Chalkbeat

Schools do not have to follow Trump administration’s DEI order, federal judge rules

2025-08-15T20:57:58+00:00

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Schools do not have to abide by or certify compliance with the Trump administration’s contested interpretation of civil rights law laid out in February, after a federal judge overturned the policy and related guidance on Thursday.

In an opinion that applies to schools nationwide, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher wrote that the Trump administration had failed to follow the proper administrative procedures to make such a sweeping change, and that both a Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter issued by the Education Department and a related certification requirement were unlawful.

Multiple lawsuits against the rules already had resulted in a patchwork of injunctions. However, Gallagher’s decision will likely bring some relief to many school leaders and state education officials who had worried they would lose federal funding if they did not certify compliance with the Trump administration’s interpretation of federal anti-discrimination laws — and that complying could mean dropping commonly used diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.

“The government did not merely remind educators that discrimination is illegal: it initiated a sea change in how the Department of Education regulates educational practices and classroom conduct, causing millions of educators to reasonably fear that their lawful, and even beneficial, speech might cause them or their schools to be punished,” Gallagher wrote.

The Feb. 14 guidance and certification requirement had been put on hold as three separate lawsuits worked their way through the courts. That included the case brought by the American Federation of Teachers and others that led to the Thursday ruling, as well as lawsuits from a coalition of state attorneys general and the Legal Defense Fund on behalf of the NAACP.

Randi Weingarten, the head of the AFT, said in a statement on Friday that the judge’s ruling represented “a huge win for students, families and educators” and a rebuke of the government’s attempt to “chill teachers’ duty to create safe and welcoming classrooms where critical thinking is valued and history is presented in an open and honest way.”

In an email, a spokesperson for the Education Department said the department was disappointed in the judge’s ruling, but that getting rid of the guidance “has not stopped our ability to enforce Title VI protections for students at an unprecedented level,” referring to the federal law that bans discrimination based on race, skin color, and national origin in schools.

“The Department remains committed to its responsibility to uphold students’ anti-discrimination protections under the law,” the spokesperson wrote.

The spokesperson did not respond to a question about whether the Trump administration intends to appeal the decision.

The Trump administration continues to advance its opposition to DEI on several fronts. It is conducting civil rights investigations into states and school districts over practices ranging from the launch of a Black student success plan in Chicago to the use of race-based affinity groups for staff and students. Officials have slashed federal grants designed to expand opportunities for students of color or that were awarded with student diversity in mind.

And Attorney General Pam Bondi recently issued a memo to all federal agencies with similar intentions as the Education Department’s now-defunct guidance, noting that DEI programs can be discriminatory and that relying on certain race-neutral criteria, such as “cultural competence,” “lived experience,” or geography, can violate federal law if it’s used a proxy for a protected characteristic, like race, to create advantages for some people.

Gallagher, who was nominated to her position by President Donald Trump during his first term, did not weigh in on whether the Education Department’s DEI policy was “good or bad,” but said that the agency could not go “leapfrogging” over important procedures in federal law.

The judge held that the Education Department’s guidance and certification requirement amounted to new legislative rules — not a restating of existing federal laws and requirements, as the Trump administration has said — and that the Education Department should have explained why it changed course and offered a public notice and comment period to give schools and others adequate time to weigh in.

The department’s Feb. 14 guidance also interprets the Supreme Court ruling that bars affirmative action in higher education admissions “far more broadly,” the federal judge wrote, to include much more than “preventing using race as a factor in ‘zero-sum’ opportunities like admissions, hiring, promotions, or awards.”

“The administration is entitled to its own views, including on how court cases and laws should be interpreted,” Gallagher wrote. “But it is not entitled to misrepresent the law’s boundaries, and must at a minimum acknowledge and consider the relevant legal framework as it is. It cannot blur the lines between its viewpoint and existing law.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit unveils educational park dedicated to late doctor who paved way for civil rights

2025-08-14T21:35:31+00:00

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Almost 100 years after a Black physician and his family faced a horrific racial attack outside their home on Detroit’s east side, the city unveiled an educational park to honor his legacy.

Mayor Mike Duggan, the city’s General Services Department and community members gathered outside the former house of Dr. Ossian Sweet Wednesday for a ceremony celebrating a park with his namesake.

Located next door to Sweet’s former home at 2921 Garland Street, the Dr. Ossian Sweet Memorial Park features wooden planters filled with lavender, installations detailing the history of Sweet and his family, and 11 memorial trees to honor the people who were in the house during the 1925 attack: Sweet, his wife, Gladys Sweet, Sweet’s two brothers, and seven friends.

“The history isn’t something we’re proud of, but the way we remember where we’ve come from and where we are now is really important,” Duggan said Wednesday at the ceremony.

Two elm trees planted at the park entrance are dedicated to Sweet and his wife, and an oak tree in the center of the park honors their daughter Iva, who was a few months old when the event took place. Iva later died from tuberculosis at age 2.

Duggan said when he became mayor in 2013, Garland Street had deteriorated. That’s when he and the department came up with the idea for a memorial. Development began in 2022, with the support of $1 million in pandemic relief funds.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, far right, and others cut the ribbon for the new Dr. Ossian Sweet Memorial Park. The park is dedicated to Sweet, a Black doctor who faced discrimination when he moved onto the majority-white Garland Street in 1925.

“There’s an opportunity for historic tourism in this city, and we have some great history to tell,” Duggan said.“We are going to make sure that the corner of Charlevoix and Garland is going to be one of those destinations.”

Along with the park, the city’s Housing and Revitalization Department is working to renovate three vacant homes across from the Ossian Sweet House, as well as one flanking the opposite end of the park — all are being restored to match the 1925 style.

Sweet moved his family into the house on the corner of Charlevoix and Garland in September 1925, when the area of the city was all white because of redlining practices and pervasive racial discrimination in housing. During the Sweets’ first evening in their new home, a white mob of about 400 gathered on the corner to intimidate Sweet and his family, screaming and throwing rocks at the house. As the Sweets tried to defend themselves, shots were fired at the mob from inside the house; one white man was killed and another was injured. Sweet and his brother were arrested and taken to jail.

The Dr. Ossian Sweet House

In 1926, Sweet and the others inside the house were acquitted of murder in a landmark court case that paved the way for many advances in equal criminal justice for Black Americans.

Sweet moved back into the Garland Street house in 1928, where he lived until he sold the house in 1958. He died in 1960.

Duggan said during Wednesday’s ceremony that he studied Sweet’s case while he was a student at the University of Michigan Law School. As Wayne County prosecutor in the early 2000s, Duggan fought to have a Michigan historical marker placed at the house, which happened in 2004.

“You can actually go in, sit in that upstairs window and look out and imagine the mob that that family saw 100 years ago, knowing all the police officers down there weren’t doing anything to protect you,” he said. “There was no protection but themselves. And you can experience what that family went through and how much they’ve helped.”

Keeping history alive

The current owner of the Sweet House is Daniel Baxter, chief of operations for Detroit’s Department of Elections, who consulted for the city’s elections office in 2020, when a predominantly white mob stormed the Huntington Center as votes in the presidential election were being counted. Baxter’s family has owned the house since 1958 after Sweet moved out.

Baxter has known about the history of his house since he was a child. At the ceremony, Baxter recalled a time when a reporter came by the house in 1975 to talk about Sweet and the attack. His parents did not want to talk to the reporter, but 10-year-old Baxter did. When the article came out the next day in the paper, his school teacher asked him to tell Sweet’s story to his classmates.

“That day when I came back home, I said to my mother, ‘I want to learn more about the man who lived in this house,’” Baxter said. “She went into the pantry, grabbed a banker’s bag with a treasure of articles on Dr. Sweet.”

In 2021, Baxter and his family produced a documentary about Sweet.

“We have the opportunity to be enriched by the history and the legacy and resilience of Dr. Ossian Sweet,” he said.

The home was named to the National Registry of Historic Places by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1985 and, in 2018, the African American Civil Rights program of the Historic Preservation Fund at the National Park Service gave the city a $500,000 grant to rehab and repair Sweet’s house, which had fallen into disrepair.

Baxter founded the Ossian H. Sweet Foundation, which operates the home. The restoration project was recently completed so that the house can serve as a public museum.

Sweet’s niece, Jacqueline Spotts, 83, told BridgeDetroit Wednesday that she remembers her uncle always teaching her about Black history and civil rights.

But she only learned about the attack after reading about it in a newspaper as an adult. With the attack being a “scar on the family” for a long time, Spotts is happy to see the city recognize her uncle with the park.

“It’s wonderful, and God has allowed me to see it,” she said.

Annie Marshall and her granddaughter also attended the ceremony. She’s lived in a home down the street on Garland since she was 8 years old. Now 75, Marshall remembers visiting the Baxters during the 1960s and hanging out with the family during block parties and other events.

She found out about Sweet in high school, and she said she is glad to see the park and the city’s plans to renovate the four houses nearby. She said the neighborhood has faced ups and downs over the years, and she’s starting to see people move back in on the block.

“I think he (Sweet) would be proud of the street now,” Marshall said.

Trump wants to withhold money from schools teaching ‘discriminatory equity ideology,’ gender identity

2025-01-29T23:39:54+00:00

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President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Wednesday seeking to withhold federal funding from K-12 schools that teach “discriminatory equity ideology” or “gender ideology.”

The order defines discriminatory equity ideology as anything “that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups” rather than as individuals. That includes the idea that people can be inherently privileged or oppressed because of their race or gender, which likely targets concepts such as white privilege.

The language is similar to the text of several state laws that have sought to limit teaching about systemic racism and sexism and targeted “critical race theory” — though the order does not use that term.

“Gender ideology,” as defined in an earlier executive order, includes any acknowledgement of gender identities besides the male or female sex that a person is assigned at birth.

The news was first reported early Wednesday by the Daily Caller.

Federal funding accounts for about 8% to 10% of funding for K-12 schools but can represent a much larger portion in high-poverty schools and districts.

It’s unclear what exactly would rise to the level of teaching these concepts. But the executive order’s targeting of education issues related to race and gender illustrates the administration’s keen interest in pushing schools away from teaching certain subjects in certain ways — a desire Trump began expressing strongly towards the end of his first term.

Trump executive order seeks to steer federal funds to private school vouchers

Trump and other critics of critical race theory often have used the term as a catchall for everything from efforts to diversify the teacher workforce to curriculum revisions that better incorporate the perspective of Black Americans in lessons about slavery and the founding of the country. Some conservatives see course materials that refer to systemic racism or white privilege as evidence of critical race theory in K-12 schools — a viewpoint that would likely carry over to “discriminatory equity ideology.”

Trump and his supporters have used the phrase “gender ideology” to describe teaching about gender identity and the existence of transgender people. In an earlier executive order, Trump sought to define sex as a binary — male or female — that cannot be changed. On Tuesday, Trump issued another order seeking to curtail gender-affirming care for trans children and teens.

It’s also unclear whether the federal government has the authority to do this. Federal law prohibits federal officials from telling schools what they can and cannot teach. The American education system is set up such that decisions about what kids should learn are made at the local level.

On top of that, several states require schools to teach ethnic studies and to include a diverse range of perspectives in their lessons. Seven states require schools to include lessons about LGBTQ history or issues, according to the Movement Advancement Project, which tracks such laws. Trump has previously said he wants to shift authority over education to the states, in tandem with his stated desire to close the U.S. Department of Education.

Similar efforts to restrict lessons about sexism, racism, and bias at the state level have faced legal challenges at the state level for being too vague. A settlement in Florida over the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law found that students and teachers couldn’t be prohibited from discussing LGBTQ issues, so long as it wasn’t part of formal instruction.

The order could stoke fear and confusion among educators and school officials, many of whom already operate under a state law or district policy that limits what they can teach about certain hot-button topics. Eighteen states have laws or official policies limiting lessons on racism and sexism, according to a tracker maintained by Education Week. Some states also restrict lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity, or require parents to give permission for their children to learn about these topics.

How exactly the federal government would monitor what’s being taught in classrooms across the nation’s some 13,000 school districts is also an open question. Some states with laws limiting instruction about racism, sexism, and gender identity have set up websites or processes where parents can review curriculum and report lessons or teachers that they think are out of compliance.

On Tuesday, the Department of Education opened a civil rights investigation into a Denver high school that converted a girls’ restroom to an all-gender restroom based solely off a local news report, rather than a formal complaint. That probe could be a preview of how the federal government might deal with schools that the Trump White House believes are ignoring or somehow flouting the executive order, without a time-consuming complaint or investigative process.

The order directs the incoming secretary of education to provide the president with a plan within 90 days on how to end lessons on these topics.

Trump nominated Linda McMahon, the former CEO of the WWE professional wrestling franchise, to head the U.S. Department of Education, though her confirmation hearing has yet to be scheduled.

The order also reinstates the 1776 Commission, which was set up during the first Trump administration to promote “patriotic education” and to challenge lessons that present “America’s story solely as one of oppression and victimhood rather than one of imperfection but also unprecedented achievement toward freedom, happiness, and fairness for all.”

Experts said the report produced by the commission, composed of conservative thinkers and academics, whitewashed and distorted American history. Former President Joe Biden disbanded the commission shortly after he took office.

This story has been updated to reflect the contents of the executive order signed by Trump.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Newark community leaders urge school district for solutions to address racism allegations

2025-01-24T20:19:43+00:00

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Newark leaders and advocates are urging Superintendent Roger León and the Newark school board to address racial tensions after Chalkbeat obtained a copy of a scathing draft report that found Black students and teachers at a city high school endured racial and religious harassment.

The review, conducted by the consulting firm Creed Strategies, also found district and school leaders failed to “quickly and consistently” address the problems at the Newark School of Global Studies and in some cases, magnified racial issues. The draft obtained by Chalkbeat is not the latest version of the report but Newark Public Schools has fought to keep all versions of the report private.

During Thursday’s school board meeting, three residents demanded transparency from the district about the steps it is taking to find solutions.

Tony Al-Amin, a Weequahic High School alum and Imam at Newark’s Masjid Muhammad, raised concerns about the “racism that exists in our schools.”

“Racism is a social terror. This is not my imagination, this is what is actually happening,” Al-Amin said. “When people are treated unjustly, unfairly in one place, it makes injustice acceptable in other places.”

Yolanda Johnson, an education advocate, spoke about the need for transparency and said “it was painful to read” the draft report on Global Studies.

“It’s 2025, we are demanding and we want inclusion, equity, accountability, and we want transparency,” Johnson added.

León did not respond to the comments but board member Josephine Garcia said the board has access to a “wide range of non-public information” that offers a “perspective vastly different from the narrative being presented.” Once all the information is made available, “a much clearer and more informed understanding will emerge,” Garcia added.

“No issue can be fully addressed without considering both sides and at the moment, one side of the issue remains suppressed,” Garcia said.

Board member Dawn Haynes, who faced removal from her role after her daughter filed a legal claim against the district alleging discrimination during her time as a Global Studies student, recalled how her husband “was hurt, disappointed, and ignored” and, out of fear of being labeled as a threatening parent, could not do anything about the situation.

“I held my composure for three years … knowing that my child and her friends were harmed and it was covered up,” said Haynes during Thursday’s meeting.

Earlier this week, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and North Ward Councilman Anibal Ramos also said they plan to call on León to discuss the findings and will continue to raise awareness about equity and inclusion.

“Nurturing student growth toward equality and inclusion however, takes a lot more than holding forums and events. This work is an ongoing historic and cultural transformation that relies on continued curriculum focus and the student dialogue it spurs,” Baraka said in a statement Tuesday.

Former Global Studies students first raised the allegations of racism detailed in the draft report during a November 2022 school board meeting. In response, school board members commissioned a review of the cultural, racial, and religious dynamics at Global Studies that pushed some Black students to transfer and teachers to resign.

But in 2023, León said the report would remain internal and inform the district’s strategy on race. The issues also caught the attention of Baraka, who hosted a town hall in March 2023 to discuss unity among Black and brown communities months after students spoke publicly about their experiences.

In his Tuesday statement, Baraka said he spoke in depth with the former students at Global studies and their parents about “how we cannot tolerate racism.” He also spoke with León about the issues, which led to the school bringing in a consultant “to try to get a handle on the situation.”

“Our goal is to raise awareness in our children so they won’t fall victim to what is going on around the country, and in fact become leaders for tolerance and inclusion as adults,” Baraka added.

Ramos, a city councilman, in a statement last week said council members had received “limited information” from the district about the Global Studies report due to confidentiality issues. His office had met with a few parents from the school over the past year and at one point, some of the parents met with him and Baraka.

“The allegations referenced in the leaked report are concerning and any type of racist comments – regardless of who they came from – are disturbing and unacceptable,” Ramos added.

He plans to speak with other council members about having Leon and others come before the city council’s education committee to discuss the report’s findings and the district’s plans to address the issues and improve the environment at Global Studies.

At Thursday’s school board meeting, Hassana Shaw, an educator and member of the Council of Imams in New Jersey, said the district “needs to be truthful about what is going on in our schools.”

“We can’t keep quiet about things that are happening with our kids. We have to take direct action to make sure our students are being educated in a place that’s safe, because we can’t teach them if they don’t feel safe,” said Shaw.

She also spoke against the district’s efforts to unseat Haynes, saying the board should not get rid of “board members who try to ensure that our children don’t encounter the trauma and hardship while they’re in school.”

“And with that said, board member Dawn Haynes is owed an apology for the covert actions taken to try to remove her from her position,” added Shaw on Thursday.

Malkia King, the daughter of former board member Barbara King, said the current board is “different from the board my mother sat on.” She recalled how Black and Puerto Rican residents came together to fight for local control of the school board.

“We worked too hard to overcome [racism] and we’re supposed to be the model going forward, and it [would] seem like we’re going backward,” King said.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Newark Teachers Union ends lawsuits for Global Studies report without district promise to release it

2024-11-07T21:16:16+00:00

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The Newark Teachers Union has withdrawn two lawsuits seeking the release of a scathing report on the cultural dynamics at the Newark School of Global Studies after reaching a deal with the district – but it remains unclear if the public will get to see the report.

Union President John Abeigon, who spearheaded the lawsuit, wouldn’t disclose the terms of the agreement in a call with Chalkbeat Thursday, or say if the settlement would require the district to release the consultant’s report to the union or the public. The agreement has not been filed yet in Essex County Superior Court, and neither party has provided it to Chalkbeat.

In the lawsuits filed a year ago, the union called on the district to release the Creed Strategies report, which school officials have claimed was a draft and therefore exempt from public records law. The report was part of a research and data-sharing agreement with the firm that came at no cost to the district, according to board records.

Abeigon, who has previously criticized the district for “being less than forthcoming with information” about the report, said Thursday he had not seen the report and does not know if Superintendent Roger León will release it.

“I’m convinced that there’s nothing in that report that can’t be resolved within the current structures of the Newark Board of Education and its responsibility to the public,” Abeigon said.

When asked what changed the union’s position about demanding the release of the report, Abeigon said “we changed our position. That’s it.”

The district didn’t respond for requests for comment on the case Thursday.

Last month, the union and Newark Public Schools reached a tentative agreement in the cases that would require the union to withdraw its 2023 and 2024 lawsuits without admission of liability or fault, according to a letter filed by the district’s attorney, Eltia Montano Galarza of the Taylor Law Group.

The end of the union’s lawsuits comes two years after a group of Black students at Global Studies spoke at a board meeting in November 2022 about the racial harassment they experienced at the school. Emails obtained by Chalkbeat Newark showed parents and students had brought their concerns to the school’s principal, Nelson Ruiz, and vice principal Hoda Abdelwahab months before the board meeting. Parents called for the removal of Ruiz after criticizing him for handling the situation poorly. Ruiz continues to be the principal at Global Studies, and Abdelwahab resigned from her role in 2023.

In response, the Newark school board in January 2023 commissioned Creed Strategies, a consulting firm specializing in diversity issues, to conduct a review of the high school’s cultural, racial, and religious dynamics. The firm, which previously helped the district create its one-year plan after the end of state operation in 2020, completed its review months later, but Leòn said the report would remain internal despite numerous calls from the community, board members, and advocacy groups to release it.

In September 2023, León provided the first and only glimpse into the report by releasing three recommendations that called on the district to assess the effects of “anti-Blackness” on the school system, foster conversations about racial issues, and build school staff’s capacity to identify cultural gaps and create a racially conscious environment.

The Newark Teachers Union first sued the district in November 2023 for access to the Global Studies report, after its public records request for the document was denied a month before. Chalkbeat Newark filed two public records requests in 2023 seeking the report, but the district also denied those requests.

The union’s attorney, Raymond Baldino of the Zazzali law firm, argued that the union had an interest in the report and in knowing how any changes or recommendations to the district’s approach in handling student and staff issues related to “anti-Blackness” or “cultural sensitivity,” would affect teachers in the district, according to court records.

The agreement between the teachers union and the district comes after Judge Mayra Tarantino, who heard the cases, ordered the district to submit the Global Studies report in January for the court’s private review.

In April 2024, the union filed a second lawsuit after a second public records request – seeking access to billing records and the contract between Creed Strategies and the district – was denied in February. Last month, Montano Galarza, the district’s attorney, filed a letter in court arguing that the union’s 2024 lawsuit was “moot” because they had later provided the documents. In response, Baldino argued that the district had violated state public records laws because the union was denied the documents in its initial request.

During October’s school board meeting, members voted to approve a proposed settlement agreement that concerned a “legal matter” but did not disclose the terms of the agreement or the related lawsuit.

Before the vote on the agreement, Board member Dawn Haynes said the motion to approve the deal was “perplexing to me.” Haynes, who in 2023 said it was “traumatizing to read” the report, has called on the district to release it. Haynes’ daughter was among the students at Global Studies who experienced ongoing racial harassment, which resulted in her and other students transferring to other district schools.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating the allegations of racial harassment against students and staff at the high school after two former Global Studies teachers filed legal claims with state and federal offices in 2023. The investigation is ongoing.

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

‘Beloved’ and five other library books banned by one of Tennessee’s largest school systems

2024-09-20T03:58:42+00:00

In one of Tennessee’s book banning hot spots, the Rutherford County Board of Education voted Thursday to remove six books from high school libraries, including Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the horrific realities of American slavery.

Also removed were Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” a coming-of-age novel in which a supporting character is gay, and “Wicked,” Gregory Maguire’s popular retelling of the classic “Wizard of Oz” tale.

But Sherry Shahan’s “Skin & Bones,” which delves into eating disorders, failed to get enough votes for removal and will stay on high school library shelves in Rutherford County Schools, a suburban district south of Nashville with about 50,000 students.

The votes came amid a politically charged national climate and debates in Tennessee over what constitutes age appropriateness versus censorship.

Tennessee legislators recently revised Gov. Bill Lee’s 2022 school library law to expand the definition of what books are prohibited. The goal, they said, is to ensure the materials are appropriate for the ages and maturity levels of the students who can access them.

But instead of holding public votes on questionable material as Rutherford County’s board did Thursday, the revised law has created confusion for librarians and school leaders, prompting many to quietly pull controversial books from the shelves. A recent survey of members of the Tennessee Association of School Librarians found that more than 1,100 titles have been removed statewide under the changes, with more under review.

Rutherford County’s board voted one by one on seven books under review at the request of board member Caleb Tidwell, who cited “sexually explicit” content that he believes crossed the line of local community decency standards.

The votes came in a packed meeting room after two hours of public comment and debate, with more than a dozen citizens speaking both for and against Tidwell’s proposal. Some who opposed the books read several passages aloud.

Also removed were two novels by Sarah J. Maas, “Queen of Shadows” and “Tower of Dawn,” and Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing.”

The decisions came after several board members expressed confusion over which state laws and policies to follow in making their decisions: the state’s criminal obscenity law that calls for review of the material as a whole, or the revised school library law that prohibits sexual content either “in whole or in part.”

Members also voted against considering a compromise from Stan Vaught, a newly elected board member who proposed creating mature reading areas within school libraries requiring parental approval for access. The seven books in question would be placed there, he said.

The ACLU of Tennessee, which sent a Sept. 16 letter urging board members to keep all seven books, said Thursday’s votes represented the viewpoints of a vocal minority who wants to ban books that address race, racism, LGBTQ+ rights, and marginalized groups.

'Beloved' is Toni Morrison's haunting novel about sexual violence and the brutality of American slavery. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

“Rutherford County students will pay the price and be at a significant disadvantage compared to their peers across the state and the U.S. who have access to these materials and are developing the critical thinking skills needed for college and beyond,” Kathy Sinback, the organization’s executive director in Tennessee, said in a statement.

But Tidwell, who called for the books’ removal, said the decisions were a “win for the protection of minors,” and he hinted that more library books will be reviewed.

“While there is likely more work to do, tonight was a step forward,” he said after the meeting.

The district already removed 29 titles earlier this year, as well as one last year, Mike Curato’s “Flamer,” a graphic novel about a gay teenager struggling with his identity.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated which character in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” identifies as gay.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

The Black community is incredibly diverse. Our lessons should reflect that.

2024-08-16T12:00:00+00:00

My Dad was born in Trinidad. My mother is Polish and British. I was born with this beautiful, complicated ancestry. I am an immigrant. I am Black. I am white. I am British. I am Trinidadian, and “I, Too” am American.

My story is common. As of 2020, mixed-race people increased to 10.2% of the U.S. population.

In recent weeks, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the phrase “turned Black.” Former President Donald Trump uttered those words, seeking to cast doubt on Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity. For Trump or anyone to suggest that the presumptive Democratic nominee, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, chose her Black identity over her Indian one — or vice versa — is beyond absurd. It’s an offensive concept, plantation-like even, “othering” nonwhite individuals and sowing division among people of color.

Abigail Henry

And yet, there was a moment in my high school education when I did “turn Black” in the eyes of my peers. I recently reflected on how I experienced my classmates’ purported colorblindness in high school. But senior year, the same students who had claimed not to notice my Blackness suggested that I was accepted to the University of Virginia only because I had written about biracial heritage in my college essay. At the time, I did not have one Black teacher to help me process my classmates’ racist claims.

When I first started teaching Black history 12 years ago, I did not talk about my own experiences in school. I was so focused on classroom management and objective mastery that I did not realize that my own racial identity and stories would help me build trust with students. They were more engaged after I honestly answered their questions about being a biracial teacher of Black history.

Intersectionality plays a significant role in many Black people’s lives.

One of the most common questions my students asked me was always in the middle of teaching a unit on the Atlantic Slave Trade. “Yo, Ms. Henry,” they would say, “What’s it like to know that people on your mom’s side did that to people on your dad’s side?”

I would answer this kind of question with something like, “Oh man, that’s something I think about all the time.” I would tell them that I often dream of my maternal and paternal ancestors sitting together at the dinner table and talking. “Wouldn’t that be a great movie?” I’d ask them and then pose a question back to them: “What do you think they would say to each other?”

Abigail Henry, pictured in an elementary school yearbook photo.

As I observe the discourse over Black identity playing out during an election year, it is evident why Black history is needed in our schools. It’s also clear that we must expand the narratives in which Black identities are taught to include the diversity of Black humanity that existed in classrooms like mine.

Black community is incredibly diverse and, as the education professor LaGarrett King put it, “Black histories consist of multiple identities that inform Blackness.”

This past year, my AP African American Studies students, social justice-minded seniors, advocated for a Black Lives Matter Week to close out Black History Month. On “Rep Your Roots Monday” we encouraged students to celebrate their ancestry. There were Caribbean and African T-shirts, flags, and swags. In our Black diversity, there was a beautiful solidarity, too. (One rising senior asked if he could have my Trinidadian classroom flag for his future college dorm room. The passing of this classroom artifact, and our shared heritage, is one of the many positive memories I will cherish.)

The West Philadelphia school where I taught is almost equivalent to an international school. Yet at first glance this would not be known. The school has students of color from all parts of the African diaspora. They come from Mali, Iraq, Jamaica, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Puerto Rico, and many other places. My students of color are also religiously diverse. Some students have both a Christian and Muslim parent.

Intersectionality plays a significant role in many Black people’s lives. So when leaders suggest that a multiracial person can have just one identity, they are telling children to deny something that may be as essential to their identity as their religious background.

I deserved better as a multiracial student, and our students deserve even better now.

Looking back at her work and writing, the Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison asserted, “Our lives have no meaning, no depth without the white gaze. And I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.” She goes on to say how other Black writers helped her center Black experiences in her novels.

As we see this white gaze playing out in the political sphere and on social media, Morrison’s message (and her books) are needed by Black teachers, Black students, and schools today. Our students of color are counting on us, to give them the history, words, and classrooms in which they can embrace their full ancestry and humanity.

Abigail Henry is an African American History teacher who is about to pursue her Ph.D. as a University at Buffalo Schomburg fellow. She has helped spearhead curriculum development at the School District of Philadelphia, won a Pulitzer Center Education Impact Grant to incorporate the 1619 Project into lessons, and recently founded an LLC called theBLKcabinet for African American History curriculum, resources, and consulting.

Hearings scheduled in Newark Teachers Union lawsuits over Global Studies report, other documents

2024-08-05T21:21:53+00:00

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Nearly two years after allegations of racial harassment at the Newark School of Global Studies first surfaced, two lawsuits demanding the release of a report analyzing the cultural dynamics at the school are scheduled to be heard in court.

A hearing for the case over the release of the Creed Strategies contract with the district, the firm that conducted the report, and billing records is scheduled for Aug. 20, according to court records online. The case over the release of the Global Studies report is scheduled for Sept. 3, Newark Public Schools’ first day of school, according to court records online.

The Newark Teachers Union sued the district in November 2023 for access to the scathing Global Studies report after Superintendent Roger León said the document would remain internal and after the union’s public records request for the report was denied. In April, the teachers union filed another lawsuit against the district after a second public records request seeking access to billing records, and the contract between the district and Creed Strategies was also denied.

The teachers union lawsuit is the first court battle to unlock the findings of the Global Studies report. It is also part of a nearly two-year battle between the community and the district over the lack of solutions and transparency after incidents of harassment against Black students and staff at the high school surfaced.

In November 2022, Black students at Global Studies spoke at a board meeting about the racial harassment they endured at the high school. In response, the report analyzing the cultural, racial, and religious dynamics at the high school was commissioned by Newark’s school board in January 2023 but the district has not made it public. The incidents at the high school resulted in at least half a dozen Black students requesting transfers and two Black teachers resigning.

Raymond Baldino, an associate at the Zazzali law firm representing the teachers union, also filed a letter to the courts in July requesting an update on the case to release the Global Studies report. The letter came six months after Superior Court Judge Mayra Tarantino ordered a review of the report in January.

“We are aware that the process may take some time, but in an abundance of caution, wished to respectfully inquire on the status, given the long period of inactivity in the case,” read Baldino’s letter to Judge Tarantino in July.

Craig Novak of the Taylor Law Group, who represents the district in both cases, did not respond to an emailed request for comment on Monday. Newark Public Schools has previously said it does not comment on pending litigation.

In June 2023, León said the report would not be released publicly despite requests from members and community leaders. In documents submitted to the Superior Court in December 2023, León argued that releasing the report would have a “chilling effect” on discussions about racial dialogue and sensitivity practices at Global Studies and districtwide.

The district last fall shared only parts of the report that contained three recommendations including the need to assess the effects of “anti-Blackness” on the school system, foster conversations about racial issues, build school staff capacity to identify cultural gaps, and create an environment that is racially conscious and inclusive. It is unclear whether the district has implemented any changes based on the recommendations in the Global Studies report.

The recommendations came as the high school’s vice principal, Hoda Abdelwahab, left the district. She was among those called out by community leaders during board meetings and in legal claims filed by former teachers at the high school for handling the issues poorly. Parents of students at the high school also called for the removal of Global Studies principal, Nelson Ruiz, who has remained in his role.

The former Global Studies teachers filed legal claims with state and federal offices in 2023, alleging they experienced harassment and racial hostility from students and supervisors. The allegations of racial harassment against students and staff are currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, according to the department’s letter notifying León about the start of the investigation on Dec. 21, 2023.

The teachers union filed its first public records request for access to the Global Studies report on Sept. 29, 2023, arguing that it had an interest in the release of the report and in knowing of any changes or recommendations to the district’s approach to handling student and staff issues related to “anti-Blackness” or “cultural sensitivity,” ultimately affecting teachers in the district.

The district denied the request, citing a legal exemption that allows some draft documents or advisory documents to be withheld from the public. Other parties, including Chalkbeat Newark, have also requested access to the report but have been denied.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee governor’s comparison of school choice to civil rights ‘deeply offensive,’ Democrats say

2024-07-17T21:42:42+00:00

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In one of the battleground states of the Civil Rights Movement, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is drawing heat for his description of school choice as “the civil rights issue of our time.”

Lee, who chairs the Republican Governors Association, made the comparison Tuesday during a four-minute speech to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee as he attacked the Biden administration’s record on education, border security, inflation, and farm policies.

“They attacked parental rights. Republican governors fought back for a parent’s right to choose their own child’s education,” Lee told delegates. “President Trump was right when he said that school choice is the civil rights issue of our time.”

Back in Tennessee on Wednesday, the state Senate’s Democratic Caucus issued a joint statement calling Lee’s assertion “not only misleading but deeply offensive.”

“Tennessee has a proud history of leading in the fight for civil rights — from the lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides to school integration and labor rights,” the caucus said. “To label a policy that promotes segregation and inequality as a civil rights issue is a grave disservice to the legacy of those who fought for justice in our state.”

The verbal scuffle comes as Lee pushes for a universal school voucher bill, a key school choice policy, in Tennessee. It would provide taxpayer funding to pay toward private school tuition for any student who wants it, anywhere in the state, including those from middle-class and wealthy families.

Lee’s proposal collapsed in committees during the recent legislative session, but he’s vowed to bring it back in 2025. To try to change the outcome, he recently endorsed Republican legislative candidates who support vouchers in their primary races over fellow Republicans who oppose the policy.

With school choice as a pillar of his own campaign platform, Lee easily won two terms in office in a state that went from blue to deep red in recent decades. But the results of various voter polls on vouchers vary wildly in Tennessee, and opponents charge the policy amounts to social welfare for the wealthy.

“The true civil rights issues of our time are those that uplift and support all children, regardless of their background. Private school vouchers do the exact opposite,” the Senate Democratic caucus said.

But Republican voucher supporters say they’re needed to put parents in charge of their children’s education. Expanding parental rights and school choice is part of the Republican Party’s 2024 platform, which delegates approved on Monday.

Tennessee has a long and blemished record on civil rights issues.

In 1920, it became the 36th and final state needed to ratify the landmark 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave millions of women the right to vote.

In 1960, at the height of the movement to abolish legalized racial segregation and discrimination, a group of college students including Diane Nash formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Nashville. The chairman was a young John Lewis, a student at Nashville’s Fisk University, who went on to become a civil rights icon and longtime congressman from Georgia before his death in 2020.

And the Rev. James Lawson Jr., who died last month at age 95, was the apostle of nonviolent protest who trained civil rights activists in Tennessee to withstand brutal responses from white authorities.

In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Memphis to march with sanitation workers in their fight for equality, dignity, and respect. Instead, he was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, which today is the site of the National Civil Rights Museum.

The Tennessee portion of the U.S. Civil Rights Trail spotlights 14 churches, schools and other landmarks that played an important role in the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century, where many civil rights leaders and supporters were killed or targeted because of their struggle for freedom.

Lee’s office did not respond Wednesday when asked whether his comparison of school choice to civil rights was appropriate.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

School leaders of color face high levels of burnout. Here’s what they need to thrive.

2024-07-17T12:00:00+00:00

As a novice teacher in 1999, I was grateful to have a colleague across the hall who was also new to the profession. We swapped stories, shared strategies, and commiserated about our shared challenges around lesson planning and staying in touch with students’ families.

At some point, though, our experiences at the same Florida elementary school diverged. While my colleague was asked to lead a grade-level team, I was tapped to head up the school’s Black History Month programming. After school, she oversaw academic enrichment while I supervised detention. On the weekend, she led a scholars program while I coached the basketball team.

Harrison Peters

My colleague was a white woman. I am a Black man.

My early leadership opportunities reflected important school staffing needs and aligned with my skill set. And while these assignments were mostly enjoyable, they didn’t prepare me for the next steps on my leadership journey. Through dogged persistence, informal guidance from fellow leaders of color, and my fair share of luck, I became a principal and, later, a district superintendent. The system, however, was not set up to support my success.

That’s because male educators of color are often “tracked” into disciplinary roles, and men and women of color report being tapped to lead equity initiatives and perform other functions that do not necessarily capitalize on their instructional expertise. Principal and superintendent roles are increasingly focused on instructional leadership. That means many educators of color who step up to lead early in their careers find themselves lacking the types of experience hiring managers look for when recruiting for school and district leadership positions.

Many of the non-instructional efforts that educators of color find themselves tapped to lead involve extra time, added stress, and little or no compensation. It’s a perfect recipe for burnout. Is it any wonder why the turnover rate for educators of color is higher than the national average? If we don’t figure this out, the continued loss of talented educators of color from our schools will persist, further hindering recruiting efforts.

Today, just one in five teachers and principals and only about 10 percent of superintendents are people of color. Given what we know about how teachers and leaders of color benefit students, and the role that principals of color play in recruiting and retaining more diverse teachers, closing leadership representation gaps is among the most urgent challenges facing our education system.

While my colleague was asked to lead a grade-level team, I was tapped to head up the school’s Black History Month programming.

When I left the superintendency in 2021, I knew my work was not done. I co-founded the nonprofit Men of Color in Educational Leadership to tackle the many ways that race, gender, and implicit bias shape — and too often impede — educational leadership opportunities. While our mission is focused on men, much of our work addresses the overlapping needs and experiences of women of color in educational leadership, too.

In 2022, we held a series of focus groups with more than 300 principals, assistant principals, and superintendents of color. These men and women served cities, suburbs, and rural communities. We sought their insight into surviving and thriving in their careers. Participants also identified policies and practices hindering educators of color from advancing into leadership roles.

We turned what we learned into a framework and free, online toolkit we call Resilient, Representative Leadership. Educators of color can draw on these resources when planning their leadership trajectory or navigating around a career roadblock or unexpected development.

We also know that emboldening resilient leaders of color without creating systems that support their advancement is just another recipe for burnout. Over the past few months, we’ve had a chance to share our findings with school officials across the country, including at conferences for district administrators and state education leaders.

In these polarized times, I’m heartened that our framework is resonating with education officials across the political spectrum. Dozens of state and local leaders have reached out to me to share how they are embracing strategies we’ve identified, including :

Identity-conscious professional development

Our professional learning communities unite same-race, same-gender educators with support from an expert facilitator who shares their background. These groups foster safe, trusting spaces for leaders of color to be vulnerable and engage in self-reflection, learning, and planning around their leadership needs, strengths, and experiences. District officials have shared that combining traditional affinity spaces with professional learning has helped them develop and retain leaders of color.

Pairing leaders of color 1:1 with same-race, same-gender mentors

Each of us, no matter our racial/ethnic or gender identity, can take steps to support educators of color in their leadership journeys. We can be non-judgmental listeners, for example, and we make connections to help our colleagues expand their professional networks. Still, the superintendents we’ve connected with recognize the value of teaming up leaders of color with role models who’ve walked a similar path. One school leader of color told us that being paired with an educator who shared her background was the first time she had a mentor who really understood the unique challenges she faced on the job.

Identifying pain points, setting goals, and tracking progress

We can’t fix what we don’t know, so after collecting data on the experiences educators of color face, our organization works with district leaders to address issues and track progress against clear, measurable goals (e.g., hiring, retention, and promotion of educators of color). As one official shared with us, this work reaps benefits for teachers and leaders of color while improving working conditions and opportunities for all educators in her district.

As a former superintendent, I encourage school officials to take bold, unapologetic action when educators of color are faced with injustice. This type of leadership could have made a huge difference for me from my early days as a Florida elementary school teacher onward. Even in regions where typical DEI efforts are non-starters, we’re seeing leaders embrace evidence-backed strategies to strengthen and diversify leadership because they deliver real results where it matters most — in schools, for all students.

Harrison Peters is the CEO and co-founder of Men of Color in Educational Leadership. He is a former state turnaround superintendent, chief of schools, deputy superintendent, assistant superintendent, principal, assistant principal, dean of students, and elementary school teacher. Peters is a U.S. Navy veteran.

Schools can’t wish away the need for DEI officers

2024-06-27T14:00:00+00:00

When my work began as the supervisor of Cultural Proficiency and Inclusiveness with Austin Independent School District in 2010, my role was to support staff members to create safe, welcoming, and inclusive schools for about 80,000 students.

By the 2017-18 school year, I was still the lone staff member providing antiracist professional learning, coaching, and capacity-building for some 11,000 district employees. I was responding to racist incidents and viral videos; some included hateful words and phrases like:

“It’s N-Word Day.”

“You have bombs in your purse.”

“If you can’t speak English, then you need to go back to Mexico!”

These incidents went viral on social media, and some made the news.

Even as I was writing this piece, I received a call asking me to help an Austin school navigate the fallout from a racist incident. Today, many schools deal with these situations with little to no professional support.

Angela Ward

That’s because some schools are eliminating top diversity and equity officer roles in response to political pressure and legislation aimed at silencing educators. Here in Texas, a ban on DEI initiatives addresses higher education, but its message seems to have trickled into K-12 school districts. Meanwhile, a committed opposition to DEI professionals argues that their work is bureaucratic and harms the students they intend to support.

In the Austin district, I was tasked with coaching campus and district leaders and their staff to address racist conflicts. Before providing recommendations or intervening, I had to understand the actions taken by leaders and staff and how students and families received those moves.

To that end, I would meet with school leaders and the staff most immediate to the students involved. Sometimes I met with students, too. These initial meetings would last three to six hours, helping me dig to the root cause of the issue, understand how leaders were supporting students, staff, and families, and determine where communication may have broken down.

My response prioritized the needs of those targeted by the racist incident. I met with staff to create space for staff grievances and solutions. I also met with parents, ministers, and community organizations. Parents needed to understand how their children were being supported and be invited to offer input. Clergy and community leaders often brought additional perspectives. Only then would we create an action plan for all the students involved.

In many cases, an immediate response was required. This meant engaging individuals while emotions were running high. Responding to the N-Word Day viral video incident, I walked into a high school cafeteria the size of a mall food court to face about 50 students. Moments before, they were outside prepared to walk to the district administrative offices. They were hurt and angry, and they wanted the adults to fix it all.

I recognized the hurt expressions on their faces, many of whose brown skin mirrored my own. Listening with me were Black staff whose emotions palpitated from every corner of the room. I, too, was emotionally on what a popular rap song labels X (10). But I could not scream or flip tables. I could not leave without hearing students’ needs, sharing my personal commitment to helping them navigate their current reality, and making a plan.

I introduced these students to the restorative circle process, a practice Indigenous communities around the world use to maintain harmony and address issues impacting the community. This process required participation by both faculty and students.

I could not leave without hearing students’ needs, sharing my personal commitment to helping them navigate their current reality, and making a plan.

Students volunteered to lead this campus-wide response and partnered up to facilitate small groups of students and adults. Administrators got parent approval, shifted the schedule one day the following week, and supported planning meetings for the circles.

In addition to addressing the underlying incident, the circle process elicited a list of things that are right in front of us but that we never really pay close attention to. The subsequent action plan highlighted the use of words that seemed commonplace in the community but held very different connotations in the school. Staff committed to addressing language and offering more opportunities for students to connect in class.

The school leadership began to engage in professional learning about better ways to handle racial conflict. To repair systemic issues, the school implemented advisory lessons focused on empathy and inclusiveness, and worked to address the lack of diversity in AP and pre-AP courses. I began working with the central office to respond to racial conflict and systemic disparities in our schools.

I know from years of experience that diversity and equity officers serve essential functions. They provide expertise, a listening ear, and a path through challenging situations. Laws to censor educators do not eliminate the conflict that can disrupt teaching and learning.

Angela M. Ward, PhD is a veteran antiracist educator with 13 years of leadership experience in district-level administration and a Public Voice Fellow at UT Austin with The OpEd Project. Follow her @2WardEquity on Instagram, Threads & X.

Tennessee textbook commission hires first staff to prepare for school library book appeals

2024-05-29T11:00:00+00:00

Tennessee’s all-volunteer textbook commission is gearing up to consider new challenges to school library books after state lawmakers broadened the definition of what materials are prohibited.

Two years after the Republican-controlled legislature gave the commission broad new appellate powers to decide ultimately which books students can and can’t access in public school libraries, the panel has yet to receive its first case for review.

But that is expected to change. And for the first time, the commission will have its own full-time staff to support its growing workload, led by a recently retired school librarian from Crossville who formerly served on the commission.

Lee Houston, who has 30-plus years of experience as an elementary school teacher, coach, and librarian, became the body’s executive director in March.

The panel also hired an administrative assistant in early May and is seeking a full-time attorney.

With a potential flood of book challenges and appeals in a state that’s one of the nation’s leaders in banning books, Gov. Bill Lee and the legislature have budgeted $500,000 for the commission to staff up, plus another $55,000 for operational expenses, to help manage the significant expansion of its mandate.

Linda Cash, the commission’s chairperson, said the dedicated support is critical, especially as book complaints work their way through local school boards.

“We expect to start seeing some of those trickle up to us,” said Cash, superintendent of Bradley County Schools.

“I think everybody on the commission will take this very seriously and understands the weight and magnitude of any decision,” she added.

Books that some parents find objectionable could be removed statewide

Amid a nationwide backlash to the racial-justice movement that began in 2020, Tennessee was among the first states to pass laws aimed at restricting what teachers can discuss in the classroom and reviewing what books are available to students.

How the age-appropriate debate is altering curriculum in Tennessee and nationwide

Themes about race and systemic racism, disparaged by hardline conservatives as “woke ideology,” were among early targets. But the range of censored content has widened to include narratives about sexual violence, LGBTQ+ topics, and transgender identities.

The American Library Association reports 350 titles were challenged in 2023 in school libraries or other public libraries across Tennessee.

The organization does not disclose where those challenges occurred, since much of the data comes from confidential reports from libraries. But based on various news reports, districts in McMinn, Roane, Rutherford, Sumner, Wilson, and Williamson counties, as well as Collierville near Memphis, have been hot spots.

And the number of book challenges is likely to increase based on recent revisions to Tennessee’s age-appropriate materials law sponsored by Rep. Susan Lynn of Mt. Juliet and Sen. Joey Hensley of Hohenwald.

The 2022 law, which the governor pushed for, requires schools to periodically screen their library materials for “age appropriateness,” based on local standards and community input. A second law, which also passed in 2022, directs the Tennessee Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission to rule on appeals of local decisions about individual books and gives the panel authority to ban them statewide.

This year, during the final days of the legislative session, lawmakers added a provision allowing a complainant to take a book challenge straight to the state commission if a school board doesn’t address a complaint within 60 days.

More significantly, the revised law defines what’s “suitable” for library collections in K-12 schools and classrooms. It flags any material that “in whole or in part contains nudity, descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse.”

Previously, the law required library materials to be appropriate for the age and maturity levels of students who could access the materials, as well as consistent with the educational mission of the school.

Supporters of the laws say they are protecting children and older students from age-inappropriate, sexually explicit material and exploitation. But critics say the goal is censorship — and that the changes will violate First Amendment freedoms.

Either way, the broadened definition puts a young-adult novel at risk of being banned for even a single paragraph referencing sexual excitement. A children’s picture book such as the Caldecott Award-winning classic “No, David!” could be pulled because one page shows the naked backside of a mischievous boy running down a street.

The 1929 novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” could be targeted for its detailed descriptions of physical and mental trauma suffered by soldiers during World War I. So could Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” which portrays brutal and abusive sex as a tool of power when early America allowed slavery.

“They’ve tweaked the definition of their own law by not including that the work has to be considered as a whole, or that it’s protected if it has serious value, whether literary, artistic, political, or scientific,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

“This is effectively banning complex works of literature that are read and used in 11th- and 12th-grade classrooms for students preparing for higher education or to enrich their own education,” she said, adding that “this might close off a whole wealth of literature that deals with difficult topics that, for instance, are part of study plans for the AP English test.”

Former librarian will lead commission’s work

Even before taking on book challenge responsibilities, the state textbook commission, whose 11 volunteer members are appointed by the governor and speakers of the Senate and House, had a full plate. Its primary task has been recommending new lists of textbooks and instructional materials for approval by the State Board of Education based on Tennessee’s ongoing revisions of its academic standards.

Currently, the commission is in the middle of the textbook adoption cycle for new science materials, a process that takes up to 18 months.

“It’s daunting and important work,” said Cash, the panel’s chairperson, “because it affects all public school students and teachers across Tennessee.”

In 2022, when the panel was given its new appellate powers over book challenges, Cash pleaded for funding to hire full-time staff as the commission missed its first big deadline to publish compliance guidelines under the new law. The legislature subsequently allocated funding so that the body no longer has to rely on the state education department for administrative help.

“We are very thankful for these positions,” Cash said.

Rep. John Ray Clemmons, who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, said Republicans have essentially created a new layer of government bureaucracy.

“It was a bad idea to start with, and now they’re throwing a half million dollars at it,” said the Nashville Democrat. “And for what? There’s nothing more undemocratic than pulling books off the shelves of public schools.”

Lee Houston speaks during a meeting of the Tennessee Textbook and Quality Materials Commission on Nov. 18, 2022, as Chairperson Linda Cash listens. Houston, who was a school librarian at the time, stepped down from the commission in March to become its first executive director.

Houston, the panel’s first executive director, worked most recently at Brown Elementary, a public school in Cumberland County, which is represented by House Speaker Cameron Sexton. In 2022, Sexton appointed her to the textbook commission, where at one of her first meetings, she argued for a rule to require that each commissioner read an appealed book in its entirety before voting.

“Context is important,” she said at the time.

In a recent interview with Chalkbeat, Houston said she expects that her new job, with an annual salary of $105,000, will focus largely on the textbook adoption process.

“We have no book appeals before us right now,” she said. “But as a commission, we will uphold the law.”

School librarians feel under attack

For school librarians across Tennessee, the latest statute revisions look like government censorship and overreach as they find themselves caught in the crossfire of national culture wars, fueled in part by pro-censorship websites like Book Looks and Rated Books.

“Do challenged books still go through due process? Or are we just supposed to pull them if they include a picture of Michelangelo’s naked statue of David?” asked Lindsey Kimery, a leader with the Tennessee Association of School Librarians.

As the library supervisor for Metro Nashville Public Schools, she considers Tennessee’s recent school library laws an affront to her profession. And she is concerned they are creating a climate of fear, especially in rural school systems without a library coordinator.

“I worry we’ll see more soft censorship there, the quiet removal of books, because there’s not someone with school library experience at the district level who has a voice at the table when it comes to dealing with these challenging times,” Kimery said.

Meanwhile, she said, librarians are “holding tight” until district-level attorneys can provide legal guidance.

“If librarians proactively remove a lot of books, we could see challenges related to censorship. If we don’t, I expect some individuals or groups will try to test the process to see what they can and can’t do,” she said. “Some school districts may just elect to let the complaints go directly to the state to deal with.”

“No matter how you slice it,” she added, “it’s bad.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Teachers can challenge Tennessee law limiting instruction on race, gender, and bias, judge rules

2024-05-09T21:45:13+00:00

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Tennessee teachers can move forward with their lawsuit challenging a 3-year-old state law restricting what they can teach about race, gender, and bias.

U.S. District Court Judge Aleta Trauger denied the state’s motion to dismiss the case.

The Nashville judge also sided with educators over questions of whether they have legal grounds to sue the state, plus whether the federal court is the appropriate jurisdiction to take up complaints about the 2021 state law.

And in a 50-page memorandum to explain her single-page order, Trauger was frequently critical of the statute, which restricts teachers from discussing 14 concepts that the Republican-controlled legislature deemed cynical or divisive. She also cited shortcomings of related rules, developed by the state education department, to outline the processes for filing and investigating complaints, appealing decisions, and levying punishment that could strip teachers of their licenses and school districts of state funding.

“The Act simply invites a vast array of potentially dissatisfied individuals to lodge complaints based on their understanding of those concepts and then calls on the Commissioner [of Education], as a sort of state philosopher, to think deeply about what equality, impartiality, and other abstract concepts really mean and enforce the Act accordingly,” Trauger wrote in her May 2 memorandum.

Meanwhile, educators are at the mercy of the personal biases of authorities, which is “exactly what the doctrine of unconstitutional vagueness is intended to guard against,” she said.

The so-called prohibited concepts law was among the first of its kind in the nation that passed amid a conservative backlash to the racial-justice movement and protests prompted by the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis.

Among its prohibitions are classroom discussions about whether “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously.”

The law’s defenders note that it permits an “impartial discussion of controversial aspects of history,” or as Rep. John Ragan, the House sponsor, described it: “facts-based” instruction.

But teachers say they don’t know how to be impartial when teaching about the theories of racial superiority that led to slavery and Jim Crow laws. The resulting confusion has influenced the small but pivotal decisions they make every day about how to prepare for a lesson, what materials to use, and how to answer a student’s question, ultimately stifling classroom discussion, many critics of the law assert.

Last July, lawyers for five public school educators and the Tennessee Education Association, the state’s largest teacher organization, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Nashville.

The suit says the language of the law is unconstitutionally vague and that the state’s enforcement plan is subjective. The complaint also says the statute interferes with instruction on difficult but important topics included in state-approved academic standards, which dictate other decisions around curriculum and testing.

Trauger, who taught school for three years before entering law school, suggested that the ambiguity could lead to a lack of due process for educators under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

“That does not mean that a law has to be wise or perfect or crystal clear, but it must mean something concrete and specific that a well-informed person can understand by reading its text,” she wrote in her memorandum.

Kathryn Vaughn, a Tipton County teacher who is among the plaintiffs, called the judge’s decision an important early step in the legal challenge.

“I’m thrilled that the judge listened to our concerns as educators and seemed to understand that this law puts teachers in an impossible position,” she told Chalkbeat on Thursday.

A spokesperson for the state attorney general’s office, which filed a motion for dismissal last September, declined to comment on the new development.

The judge set a June 17 scheduling meeting with attorneys in the case to discuss how to manage the litigation going forward.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to show the state attorney general’s office declined to comment.

Judge to review Global Studies report as part of Newark Teachers Union’s open records lawsuit

2024-01-24T22:25:25+00:00

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Newark Public Schools officials have two weeks to provide a state Superior Court judge with a copy of the report on the cultural dynamics at the Newark School of Global Studies to determine whether it can be released publicly.

The scathing report, which the district has not made public, was commissioned after incidents of racial harassment against Black students and staff at the high school surfaced more than a year ago. The Newark Teachers Union sued the district in November for access to the report after its public-records request was denied.

Judge Mayra Tarantino on Tuesday ordered the district to submit the document by Feb. 6 for the court’s private review. The judge also called for both sides to submit arguments on whether the report should be public record and whether any materials held by Creed Strategies, the consulting firm that compiled the report, are also subject to the Open Public Records Act.

Raymond Baldino, an associate at the Zazzali law firm representing the teachers union said the union requested the court’s private review of the document “rather than accept the district’s claim at face value that the report cannot be made public.”

The next hearing for this case hasn’t been scheduled, Baldino said. The district could appeal the judge’s order, he said, but attorneys have not had any discussions about that or a settlement.

Nancy Deering, the district’s spokesperson, and Craig Novak of the Taylor Law Group, who represents the district on the case, did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday afternoon.

In documents submitted to the court in December, Superintendent Roger León argued that releasing the report would have a “chilling effect” on discussions about racial dialogue and sensitivity practices at Newark School of Global Studies and districtwide.

The new court order comes amid persistent tensions between the community and the district over the lack of solutions and transparency on the issue after incidents of harassment against Black students and staff at the high school first surfaced in late 2022. The issues sparked heavy criticism from the community about the response from school and district leaders, who had known about the problems months before they became public.

The situation resulted in at least half a dozen Black students requesting transfers out of the high school and two Black teachers resigning. The former teachers have also filed legal claims with state and federal offices, alleging they experienced harassment and racial hostility from students and supervisors.

In early 2023, the Newark school board commissioned a report on the cultural, religious, and racial dynamics at Global Studies High School. But later that year, León said the report would not be released publicly despite requests from members and community leaders. The district last fall shared only parts of the report that contained three recommendations for the district.

The union filed a public records request for access to the full report on Sept. 29, 2023, arguing that it has an interest in the release of the report and in knowing of any changes or recommendations to the district’s approach to handling student and staff issues related to “anti-Blackness” or “cultural sensitivity,” ultimately affecting teachers in the district.

The recommendations released in the fall called on the district to assess the effects of “anti-Blackness” on the school system, foster conversations about racial issues, build school staff capacity to identify cultural gaps, and create an environment that is racially conscious and inclusive.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Some social studies teachers wary as national conference meets in increasingly censored Tennessee

2023-11-30T22:54:25+00:00

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About 3,500 social studies teachers converge on Nashville this weekend for their annual national conference, but not without some pushback for meeting in a state with multiple laws aimed at classroom censorship and restrictions related to discussing race and gender.

“Some of our members have worried that this could be a hostile environment for them,” said Wesley Hedgepeth, a social studies teacher in Henrico County, Virginia, and this year’s president of the National Council for the Social Studies.

Even so, attendance is set to surpass last year’s convention in Philadelphia, the group’s first in-person gathering since the pandemic. The last pre-COVID conference, in 2019, drew about 4,000 participants to Austin, Texas.

“There have been concerns about Tennessee’s divisive-concepts law and perceived censorship by the government, as well as the suppression of certain identities,” Hedgepeth said on Thursday, the eve of the three-day conference.

“We’ve been working tirelessly to make sure this is an inclusive conference and remind people that Nashville is a welcoming place,” he said.

Gov. Bill Lee, flanked by GOP legislative leaders, speaks during a press conference at the close of the 2021 session of the Tennessee General Assembly.

Under the leadership of Republican Gov. Bill Lee and the GOP-dominated legislature, Tennessee was one of the first states to impose legal limits on classroom discussions about racism and white privilege. It gave a state commission new authority to ban certain library books statewide. It also enacted restrictions on the rights of transgender students in school. One new law ensures that school and university employees can opt out of implicit-bias training.

And earlier this year, the predominantly white and older House of Representatives ousted two young Black Democratic members for the way they protested the body’s failure to pursue significant gun reforms after a shooter killed three children and three adults at a Nashville school.

Related: The ‘Tennessee 3′ made history. Will their story be taught?

Add in a 2023 state law restricting drag shows — which has since been overturned by a federal judge — and some social studies teachers from elsewhere in the nation were balking at coming to the Volunteer State.

That spurred the council, which is the nation’s premier professional organization for social studies, to issue a three-page statement this spring titled “Why Nashville?”

The paper noted that, in addition to its renowned music scene, Tennessee’s capital city is home to key moments and movements in U.S. history.

On Aug. 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women across America the right to vote.

And in 1960, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a group of college students including Diane Nash formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Nashville. The chairman was a young John Lewis, a student at Nashville’s Fisk University, who went on to become a civil rights icon and longtime congressman from Georgia before his death in 2020.

“We remain committed to providing a safe and welcoming environment for all social studies educators to come and learn with us in Nashville,” the organization’s statement said.

The last time the group held its national conference in Tennessee was in 1993. The state’s affiliate organization submitted a 2017 pitch for a return to Nashville, and organizers soon signed contracts with local hotels and convention facilities. That was before the national racial reckoning spurred by the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and a conservative backlash to subsequent anti-racism protests. Tennessee has been at the forefront of culture wars ever since.

Related: How the age-appropriate debate is altering curriculum

This spring, after the legislature expelled the two young Black Democratic members, the National Council for the Social Studies issued a four-page rebuke of the Tennessee House of Representatives. The statement called the ouster an attack on the foundational principles of democratic and republican norms and said that, intentionally or not, the state was sending its students a message that the rights to free speech, peaceful protest, and holding their elected officials accountable are “reserved for those who have a specific view or perspective.” (The two lawmakers were later reelected by their local constituents.)

Rep. Justin Pearson raises his newly signed oath of office after being reinstated to the Tennessee General Assembly on April 13, 2023, days after the Republican-controlled legislature ousted him and another Democratic lawmaker over the way they protested the state’s lax gun laws.

The vagueness of Tennessee’s censorship laws also is having a chilling effect in classrooms and school libraries. In Memphis this fall, for instance, the co-authors of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Floyd were told not to talk about systemic racism during an appearance at Whitehaven High School.

“It’s like walking on eggshells,” said Laura Simmons, an eighth-grade U.S. history teacher from Bedford County, south of Nashville. “We want to give our students the information they need, including multiple viewpoints and narratives. At this point, I think most social studies teachers are just feeling out the climate of their school, their parents, and their administration.”

As president of the Tennessee Council for the Social Studies, Simmons is co-chair of this year’s national conference and helped to plan it, along with Hedgepeth, the national president. Attendees represent all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and nine other countries. About 10% are faculty at colleges and universities.

The 2023 conference theme is “Social Studies: Working in Harmony for a Better Tomorrow,” with sub-themes about inclusivity, elevating local narratives, and seeking partnerships beyond physical and political borders.

Featured speakers include Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Caste” and “The Warmth of Other Suns,” and Albert Bender, a Cherokee activist, historian, political columnist, and freelance journalist. Jelani Memory, author of the bestselling “A Kids Book About Racism,” will talk about tackling difficult topics with young learners.

“We are not shying away from controversial issues,” said Simmons, a 22-year teacher in Tennessee. “Our philosophy is to make sure we’re giving our educators the things they need to best help their students.”

Ultimately, said Hedgepeth, the conference is focused on the future of social studies, which research shows is systematically marginalized in the U.S. education system, from kindergarten to college.

“This is a critical time right now, with the war in Israel and Palestine, the upcoming presidential election, and how politics have divided our country after COVID and other traumatic events,” he said. “I think we are seeing the consequences of a lack of social studies education echoing across our country — from how we relate to others to how we digest media to how we discern between what is true and false.”

“If you don’t teach social studies,” Hedgepeth said, “you don’t get those skills. It’s as simple as that.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Raucous protest against pro-Israel Queens teacher is ‘teachable moment,’ Banks says

2023-11-28T02:11:23+00:00

New York City schools Chancellor David Banks vowed Monday that last week’s chaotic student rally for the ouster of a pro-Israel teacher at Hillcrest High School can be a “teachable moment.”

The turmoil unfolded on Nov. 20 when hundreds of students filled the halls of the Queens school in protest of a social media photo of a teacher holding an “I Stand With Israel” sign, according to students and officials. Social media videos show a raucous gathering with students dancing in hallways and a water fountain ripped from the wall. The health teacher at the center of the protest, who is Jewish, took cover in an administrator’s office on a separate floor, officials said.

Multiple students were disciplined for their role in organizing the protest, but officials declined to provide details because of privacy restrictions.

The incident drew a wave of condemnations over the Thanksgiving break, including a statement from Mayor Eric Adams calling it a “vile show of anti-semitism.”

During a visit to the school Monday, Banks, an alum of Hillcrest, tried to strike a balance between denouncing students’ actions and pushing back on what he described as overly broad criticism of the students.

“A teacher … was targeted based on her support for Israel, expressed in a permissible way outside of school hours, and her Jewish identity, and that is completely unacceptable,” Banks said Monday.

He added, in reference to media coverage of the incident and statements from some elected officials, that “the notion … these kids are radicalized and antisemitic is the height of irresponsibility, and I for one will not accept that at all.”

Students used social media to organize the walkout, which started during a changeover between classes, officials said. An estimated 400 students participated in the initial protest out of Hillcrest’s roughly 2,300-person student body. A followup student protest was planned for Nov. 22, but administrators were able to shut it down before it started, officials said.

School officials said they got wind of the Nov. 20 protest in time to alert police, who responded quickly. The teacher targeted in the protest, whose name Chalkbeat is withholding to protect her privacy, was already in an administrator’s office on another floor talking with police when the protest began, and she stayed there throughout, officials said.

Banks maintained the teacher was “never in direct danger.”

The educator didn’t reply to a request for comment, but previously told the New York Post that she was “shaken to my core by the calls to violence against me that occurred online and outside my classroom last week.”

Several students and elected officials also reported students threatened the teacher and posted her address online.

Banks said the teacher is expected to return to work this week and promised that the school will “ensure her safety” and that staff and students will “wrap arms around” her.

The school is partnering with an organization called Operation Respect to help lead conversations about improving school culture, officials said.

Students at Hillcrest acknowledged Monday that the protest had gotten out of hand, but maintained that the students who escalated the action weren’t the ones who’d organized it.

“It was meant to be a peaceful protest in the very beginning,” said Muhammad Ghazali, the senior class president. “But some of these students lack maturity. These are teenagers.”

Many of the students who participated didn’t “think of it as a serious moment or a moment to actually go out and protest,” but “did it for their personal enjoyment,” he added.

Another student who spoke to Chalkbeat anonymously pushed back on the accusation that the protest was antisemitic.

“The intent … was just to be pro-Palestine,” the student said. “It was not, it was not to attack her for being Jewish. We have teachers that are Jewish, and we love them to death.”

Banks said he came to Hillcrest Monday not just to offer a condemnation but to listen to students and try to better understand what sparked their anger.

Roughly 30% of Hillcrest’s students are Muslim, and some “came from warzones” like Yemen, said one Hillcrest educator who spoke on the condition of anonymity. What’s happening in Gaza is “traumatic” for them, the educator added.

“They consume their information through social media,” Banks said. “And what they are seeing on a daily basis are children and young people in Palestine … being blown up.”

“When they all of a sudden saw this image of the teacher that says, ‘I Stand With Israel,’ the students articulated to me they took that as a message that I’m affirming whatever is happening to the Palestinian family and community,” Banks said. “That made sense to me.”

Schools across New York City have struggled with how — and if — to talk to students about Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, in which militants killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage, and Israel’s subsequent bombardment, which has killed more than 14,000 people, according to Palestinian health authorities.

Students told Chalkbeat they’re inundated with graphic images of the violence on social media and often struggle to make sense of conflicting sources of information. Many crave safe spaces to talk about those issues in school.

But many educators are wary of wading into such a potentially explosive conversation — some more so after Banks reminded teachers not to share their political beliefs in class and cautioned about out-of-school political activism.

Several Hillcrest students said they had few chances to talk about what is happening in Gaza and Israel before last week’s events.

“Don’t just think you can just skate by it,” one student said. “Because these [issues] are in these children’s hearts, and they’re going to feel a type of way about it. So it’s best to address it … It’s a boiling pot. Now, that exploded, and this is what happened.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

How a George Floyd book event at Whitehaven H.S. got squeezed by Tennessee law

2023-11-07T16:24:27+00:00

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Students at Memphis’ Whitehaven High School got a chance last month to hear from journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, authors of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on George Floyd — his life, his brutal killing by police in 2020, and its aftermath.

But the students didn’t get to hear any excerpts from “His Name Is George Floyd,” and they weren’t allowed to take home copies of the book from school. The authors had to give their presentation without going too deep into the book’s main theme of systemic racism.

Who determined the restrictions and why is unclear. The organizers of the event, a local partnership called Memphis Reads, said their instructions to the authors were based on guidance from the school district on complying with Tennessee law that requires that books used in school be “age appropriate.”

Memphis-Shelby County Schools officials disputed their account, but repeatedly declined to answer questions about what they told the organizers or how they interpreted the law. In an email to the authors after the event, district communications chief Cathryn Stout said MSCS did not run the book through its review process before the visit.

In the end, the authors told Chalkbeat, the students who gathered at Whitehaven that day were shortchanged by restricted access to the book and a censored experience.

“Neither Tolu nor I know who to cast blame on,” Samuels said. “I’m not sure we could, or we should.”

But the ambiguous restrictions in this and other Tennessee laws have caused concern at the local level about compliance, Samuels said, resulting in “messy, potentially explosive debates between entities that usually get along.”

What is Memphis Reads?

Memphis Reads is a 12-year-old community reading program based at Christian Brothers University.

Each year, a selection committee chooses a book and brings the author or authors to Memphis to speak at CBU and Rhodes College, another partner. The program focuses on first year students at each school, but expands to include students at one public high school. The selected book usually relates to Memphis in some way.

This year, for instance, a CBU assignment asked students to relate the book’s themes to Memphis, where five police officers were charged in the death of Tyre Nichols. Nichols died in January, three days after officers beat him during a traffic stop. His death brought on federal investigations that have pushed Memphis to reexamine the relationship between its police and its people.

The five officers were fired after an internal investigation. One of the officers accepted a plea deal Thursday.

“The whole point of it … . is that we want to build community one book at a time,” said Justin Brooks, who has led the event since 2021 as CBU’s director of community engagement.

George Floyd killing sparked a movement, then a backlash

Floyd was killed during an arrest in May 2020, when a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee onto Floyd’s neck for several minutes. An onlooker’s video recording of the event went public, triggering a huge outcry and calls for and policing reform. The officer was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder.

Samuels and Olonnuripa’s book, written while both were reporters at the Washington Post, looks not just at the incident but also at how pervasive racism in education, criminal justice, housing, and health care systems shaped Floyd’s life. “We learned about the man himself … and much more than how he died,” Samuels said during a forum at Rhodes College.

They also wrote about what happened afterward: a season of demonstrations, dialogue, and unrest during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by what they call a “burgeoning backlash” to the racial justice movement, resulting in state laws across the country that stifled classroom discussions on race.

Tennessee was among the first states to legislate what public school students can — and cannot — be taught about race, gender, and bias. And the penalties are steep. Educators who violate the law may have their teaching licenses suspended or revoked. Districts can be fined for repeat offenses.

The authors of “His Name Is George Floyd” won 2023 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

MSCS officials and the Memphis Reads organizers did not specifically cite this law as a factor in what ultimately happened at Whitehaven, but the law nonetheless hangs over educators’ decisions about what topics are appropriate for classroom discussion. Two Memphis teachers are among five in Tennessee challenging the law in federal court.

Tennessee’s Age Appropriate Materials Act, meanwhile, requires schools to publish a list of what’s in their library collections online and develop policies to review and remove books that aren’t appropriate — a term that the law leaves undefined.

MSCS has leeway to interpret this law, but longstanding tensions between the majority-Black, Democratic-led city and the mostly white, GOP-dominated state government mean the district can ill afford to risk a fight with the state over the nuances of race and books.

Christian Brothers University runs the Memphis Reads program in partnership with other community groups. In communication with Chalkbeat, CBU cited the Age Appropriate Materials law as the reason it understood that books and materials couldn’t be distributed at the Whitehaven event and said that the guidance came from the Memphis school district.

CBU and other Memphis Reads partners “were under the instruction of MSCS leadership when completing the formatting and regulations concerning the Age-Appropriate Materials Act,” Justin Brooks, the CBU community engagement director who heads Memphis Reads, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat.

MSCS officials wouldn’t confirm that to Chalkbeat, or explain whether Tennessee’s law regulating classroom conversations about race influenced any restrictions.

In the email to the authors after the event, shared later with Chalkbeat, Stout wrote that time constraints prevented the district from going through its own process to approve the book. Stout wrote that the district regretted that their “experience was anything less than welcoming.”

“Given the new, more detailed process, it will take some time to coordinate, but please know that His Name Is George Floyd is now under consideration to be added to the Whitehaven High School library collection,” Stout wrote to the authors, “and we look forward to having conversations with other school communities as requests arise.”

Separately, Stout shared with Chalkbeat a copy of a description from library book distributor Baker & Taylor that categorizes the book as “adult” and among the American Library Association’s “Notable Books for Adults.”

Stout also wrote in a public social media comment explaining the district’s position that the American Library Association labeled “His Name is George Floyd” as “adult literature (18 and older).”

What the ‘adult’ label says about a book

ALA spokesperson Raymond Garcia told Chalkbeat that the group “does not rate books” for age appropriateness.

Booklist, a book review magazine published by the ALA — and listed among resources for librarians in an MSCS manual — uses its “adult” label not to be restrictive but to signal that a book would be of interest primarily to adults, Garcia said.

“His Name is George Floyd” is also categorized as “nonfiction” and “social sciences.”

If the label was a factor in the decision not to allow Memphis Reads to distribute the books at Whitehaven, then that’s an “inaccurate understanding” of the purpose of such book labels, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association.

“We can think of any kinds of works of literature that would have been originally rated as of interest to an adult reader that are absolutely fine for young people to read, and it’s not too controversial,” Caldwell-Stone told Chalkbeat, citing “To Kill a Mockingbird” as an example.

Nonetheless, the ambiguity in Tennessee’s standard of “appropriateness” creates gray areas and heightens the stakes for local districts concerned about avoiding a violation, Caldwell-Stone said.

If a person or district cannot risk breaking the law, “then you’re going to be very thoughtful about what books you offer,” she said, “and thereby limit the opportunities to learn and engage with all kinds of ideas, even controversial or difficult ideas.”

A spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Education says MSCS did not reach out to the state for guidance, and MSCS didn’t respond to a question from Chalkbeat about that issue.

Thanks to a donation from the publisher, Viking Books, students who want a free copy of the book will be able to get one from Respect the Haven, a community development group in Whitehaven that’s part of Memphis Reads.

Whitehaven High School serves some 1,500 students and is known among Memphis for its school pride and focus on students’ post-secondary scholarship achievements. Almost all of its students are Black, and about half of them are from low-income families.

“This event basically got censored out of fear of violating some law,” said Jason Sharif, head of Respect the Haven. “With us being a predominantly Black city, a predominantly Black school district, you cannot keep books like this or stories like this from being told to Black students.”

Jason Sharif, head of Respect the Haven, a partner in Memphis Reads, said the Whitehaven H.S. event “got censored” out of concern about state law.

Students caught up in racial politics

By the time Samuels and Olorunnipa arrived at Whitehaven High School for the event on Oct. 26, they knew some of the restrictions they would have to operate under. The two reporters were prepared to tell students about the journalistic work that went into writing the book, but to avoid going into depth about many of the issues it raised.

Brooks, from Memphis Reads, had told them they wouldn’t be able to read directly from the book, or talk about the book’s discussion of how systemic racism created many barriers for Floyd, long before his arrest and killing. MSCS was involved in setting these restrictions, Brooks said. The district did not comment on its role.

Instead of an open question-and-answer period, five students were pre-selected to ask Samuels and Olorunnipa prepared questions, which was different from the open conversations at the two other panels that Memphis Reads organized. This was in line with MSCS protocol for events, Brooks said.

Brooks said it was CBU’s call to keep the event closed to media, out of concern for student safety. A Chalkbeat reporter attended two similar events at the college level.

Stout said Brooks and Sharif had created a narrative about the event that is “inconsistent” with the district’s point of view and its own initiatives. She highlighted a Memphis school integration curriculum and a social emotional learning curriculum involving the death of Tyre Nichols, a Black man who was fatally injured by Memphis police after a traffic stop in early 2023.

MSCS told Chalkbeat that it was glad Whitehaven students had the opportunity to hear the journalists speak, as did CBU in its own communication.

Authors Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa had early doubts about being part of an event at Whitehaven High School with restrictions on their speech, but said they were grateful for the opportunity.

And Samuels and Olorunnipa, who had early doubts about being part of an event with restrictions on their speech, said they were grateful for the opportunity, too. They were approached at the end of the event by a Whitehaven high schooler with a notebook full of questions who said he wanted to be a journalist. The authors relished the chance to expand what the student imagined for his future.

“Even through this period of backlash, we think it’s important to continue to push forward and continue to make a pathway for people who are caught up in the back and forth,” Olorunnipa said during another forum.

“A lot of these kids have nothing to do with the politics,” Olorunnipa added. “They are just trying to make it. They’re just trying to live their best lives. And sometimes they become pawns in our political fights.”

Laura Testino covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Laura at LTestino@chalkbeat.org.

Newark Teachers Union files lawsuit seeking release of Global Studies report

2023-11-03T16:04:37+00:00

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The Newark Teachers Union is asking a judge to order the release of a report on the racial and cultural dynamics at Newark’s School of Global Studies that Superintendent Roger León said would remain internal.

The union filed a lawsuit seeking the report after the district denied a public records request demanding the release of the scathing review of cultural, religious, and racial dynamics at Global Studies. The review was conducted after incidents of harassment against Black students and staff at the school surfaced a year ago.

The district denied the union’s request in October, citing a legal exemption that allows draft documents or advisory documents prepared to recommend or form part of a deliberative process to be withheld from the public.

The union filed the public records request on Sept. 29, a day after the regular board meeting that month. In both the public records request and the lawsuit, the union cites its “Common Law Right of Access,” or right to ask for the review, arguing that it has an interest in the release of the report and in knowing of any changes or recommendations to the district’s approach in handling student and staff issues related to “anti-blackness” or “cultural sensitivity,” ultimately affecting teachers in the district.

During the September meeting, community members, including the Newark Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, also demanded the release of the full report.

Earlier that week, the district had released three recommendations within the report, providing the first glimpse into the scathing review.

“We were surprised that the board was not more forthcoming about what was in the report and more importantly, what they were going to be doing to resolve the issues that came up in the report,” said John Abeigon, president of the Newark Teachers Union, after the lawsuit was filed in Superior Court of New Jersey on Thursday afternoon.

The union’s lawsuit is the first court battle against the district for the release of that report, conducted by consulting firm CREED Strategies led by Dr. Lauren Wells. The district has also received other public records requests for the release of the report, including two filed by Chalkbeat Newark.

The review of the school began in January when board members approved a data-sharing agreement with CREED strategies in an attempt to mend problems after students spoke publicly last November about their experiences of racial harassment on campus. The issues drew heavy criticism from the community about the way the school and district leaders handled the situation and led several students to transfer and some teachers to resign.

But during a June press conference, León said details about the review would not be made public but rather, would serve as “an internal document” to help inform a strategy to tackle racial issues in city schools. Details about that strategy have not been shared with the public.

During that press conference, León also said he would call on Global Studies principal Nelson Ruiz to help other principals deal with similar issues at their schools and provide guidance as needed.

In September, two days before the monthly regular board meeting, the district shared a glimpse of the unreleased report after it revealed three recommendations included in the review. The recommendations suggest Newark must assess the effects of “anti-Blackness” on the school system, foster conversations about racial issues, and commit to “culturally responsive-sustaining education transformation.”

In addition to the recommendations, principal evaluations were modified to include “equity indicators” and base performance on their school’s climate, among other existing criteria, according to a board committee report detailing the recommendations.

But Abeigon said without knowing what the report says, it’s unclear the extent of how the situation affected its teachers. Board members have also called on León to share the report with the public. In August, the district told them they could read the report by setting up a time with them to view it.

“But we try to be proactive, especially when the district is being less than forthcoming with information,” Abeigon added.

Students and teachers were at the center of the racial and religious harassment at Global Studies. In August, two former teachers of the high school filed a legal notice against the district and claims with the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights after suffering “severe emotional problems” because of the racial harassment they experienced at Global Studies, according to those teachers.

They also filed a complaint with the district’s affirmative action office alleging principal Ruiz, vice principal Hoda Abdelwahab, who started a new position at Millburn Township Public Schools in August, and department chair Shagun Kukeja created a hostile work environment at the high school based on race. Newark Public Schools completed its own investigation of those incidents in July.

That review led by Yolanda Mendez, the district’s affirmative action office, did not find “sufficient evidence” to support a finding of harassment, discrimination, hostile work environment, or retaliatory conduct in violation of district policy or state or federal laws.

“At this point, we don’t know what we will find, but we are curious why they are so reluctant to share this document with the public,” Abeigon said.

The incidents at the high school last fall also received attention from Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who met with students last December and hosted a town hall this spring to discuss unity among Black and brown communities.

Before the issues came to light last November, emails obtained by Chalkbeat Newark showed that parents emailed Ruiz, Abdelwahab, and other school leaders begging for an end to the ongoing harassment. At least one parent called for the removal of Ruiz, who remains the principal of the school.

Global Studies first opened its doors in 2020 welcoming ninth graders to a high school offering a global perspective where students could study different cultures and prepare to study abroad.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Newark schools must assess effects of ‘anti-Blackness,’ identify cultural gaps, Global Studies report recommends

2023-09-28T19:10:05+00:00

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Newark Public Schools must assess the effects of “anti-Blackness” on the school system and foster conversations about racial issues, an unreleased report examining harassment at the city’s School of Global Studies recommends.

The report also calls on the district to build school staff capacity to identify cultural gaps and create an environment that is racially conscious and inclusive.

The recommendations provide a glimpse into a scathing review of the cultural, religious, and racial dynamics at Global Studies after incidents of harassment against Black students and staff surfaced nearly a year ago. The news also comes as the high school’s vice principal Hoda Abdelwahab, who was among those called out for handling the issues poorly, left the district.

It’s unclear if the recommendations will be implemented in all public schools.

This is the first time Newark revealed details about the report, which were shared in a board meeting this week. In June, Superintendent Roger León said the review would not be released publicly but rather would serve as “an internal document” to help inform a strategy to tackle racial issues in city schools.

In a call with Chalkbeat Newark on Wednesday, vice president Dawn Haynes, one of the board members who has read the report, said: “It was traumatizing to read.”

“Those students and staff that were affected by the environment at the School of Global Studies show a deeper concern with America as a whole with racism and separation that should never be tolerated in any school,” said Haynes, whose daughter was among those who transferred out of the school due to the ongoing religious and racist harassment she experienced.

Last November, Global Studies students spoke publicly about their experiences of racial harassment during their time at the high school. The issues drew heavy criticism from the community about the way the school and district leaders handled the situation and led several students to transfer and some teachers to resign.

The investigation, conducted by consulting firm CREED Strategies, began in January after board members approved a data-sharing agreement with the firm.

Three recommendations were mentioned during Tuesday’s school board meeting but during the discussion, Haynes said there “were more than three recommendations that we agreed to have as well as implement in each school.”

According to the recommendations shared by the district, Newark schools must work to do the following:

“Assess how anti-Blackness and other deficit beliefs” impact existing school systems and practices and “replace them with those that create a culture that is intentionally racially conscious and inclusive.”
Create and nurture a school culture where “issues of race, culture, and other emotionally charged topics can be discussed openly” and “are integrated into the instruction and learning of the school.”
“Commit to culturally responsive-sustaining education transformation” that develops the capacity of all school staff “to identify cultural gaps in their practices and builds the knowledge and skills they need to integrate students’ race, ethnicity, and culture.”

Newark Public Schools spokesperson Nancy Deering did not respond to a request for comment on the recommendations or the district’s plan to implement them.

Emails obtained by Chalkbeat Newark in March show parents emailed the school’s principal Nelson Ruiz, vice principal Abdelwahab, who started a new position at Millburn Township Public Schools in August according to her LinkedIn profile, and other school leaders begging for an end to the ongoing harassment. At least one parent called for the removal of Ruiz, who remains the principal of the school.

Also in June, León said he would call on Ruiz to help other principals deal with similar issues at their schools and provide guidance as needed.

Dr. Lauren Wells led the report of the high school and interviewed students, staff, and parents at the center of the incidents. Wells is Baraka’s former chief education officer whose firm also helped create NPS Clarity 2020, the district’s one-year plan laying the foundation for change in schools after returning to local control.

During the August school board meeting, board members said they had not reviewed the unreleased CREED Strategies report. Board members were told they could read the report by setting up a time with the district.

Last month, two former teachers filed legal claims with the state after suffering “severe emotional problems” due to the incidents they experienced at the school, they said. The claims are the first legal actions against the district since the issues surfaced and could lead to a lawsuit.

In July, Newark Schools completed its own investigation of the incidents after the former teachers filed complaints with the district’s affirmative action office alleging the school’s principal Ruiz, Abdelwahab, and department chair Shagun Kukeja created a hostile work environment at the high school based on race.

Global Studies first opened its doors in 2020 welcoming ninth graders to a high school offering a global perspective where students could study different cultures and prepare to study abroad.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

What a cultural exchange program taught me about responding to racism

2023-08-29T12:00:00+00:00

In the heat of the Indiana sun, a cold sweat ran down my spine. With my mouth agape and adrenaline coursing through me, I wondered which instinct would win out: fight or flight.

I must have heard him incorrectly. There is no way he asked me that, right?

But he did. And now, I had to decide how to respond.

Vanessa Chen

This summer, I was one of 10 Americans chosen to participate in a government-sponsored cultural exchange program with the goals of promoting mutual understanding and civic responsibility. Out of the 10 American fellows and 45 European fellows — one from each country on the continent — I was the only young woman of Chinese descent.

As someone who grew up in New York City’s Chinatown and went to elementary, middle, and high schools with Asian majorities, I have never been a minority in my community. I have had the privilege of feeling so comfortable in my skin that race was not something I considered when I decided to attend this exchange program.

Of course, I am aware that Asians make up only around 7% of the adult American population. I have learned about America’s history of anti-Asian racism preceding even the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. And at the height of the pandemic, with hate crimes targeting Asian Americans skyrocketing, I feared for my parents’ safety every time they went outside for a simple grocery run.

That being said, I have never felt like a minority. Because in all those instances of hate that I learned about or faced, I am fortunate enough to have been in a community that reminds me to be proud of my identity. I took part in protests against AAPI hate and campaigns to support small businesses in Chinatown, and I have always had a support system.

And so, when a fellow in a majority white environment asked me whether I ate dogs or bats, I was shocked. Not knowing how to respond, I ended up laughing but not because I found it funny.

I am not usually afraid of confrontation. When I heard stories of people facing racist comments from their peers, I had always imagined that I’d demand an apology if I found myself in a similar situation. The fact that I stayed silent and laughed still feels disappointing.

At the same time, I feel lucky that my first direct encounter with racism was at age 17; I am old enough to understand that comments like these do not define me. I cannot imagine the impact that these comments can have on younger kids of color who regularly face microaggressions and worse.

Having grown up in a beautifully diverse place like New York City, I could not fully sympathize with people who purposefully reject their home language or traditions to fit into their environment. My ability to speak both Chinese and English fluently has always been something I pride myself in — not something that embarrasses me or makes me uncomfortable. But being in Indiana for a month, as one of the few Asian students in my program, I became keenly aware of why someone might feel compelled to try to assimilate.

Unfortunately, my experience with racism during my fellowship was not isolated to a single person or incident. I had to have multiple conversations with different people about it. Some people responded by apologizing right away. Other times, I had to explain to someone why certain comments were racist, not simply “jokes” to which I was overreacting.

At moments, I was too filled with emotion to say anything productive. “You don’t know anything that you are saying,” I’d say in those moments. Or “Google it.” These remarks never yielded any real understanding, but they taught me how to respond more effectively the next time.

My experience with racism during my fellowship was not isolated to a single person or incident.

I also learned how important it is to show vulnerability and empathy in these conversations. Why would you show vulnerability to someone who just said something racist to you? While some people who spout racist remarks are actively trying to undermine you, others aren’t trying to hurt you (but still do).

When I pulled aside the kid who asked me about dogs and bats and told him how I felt, he apologized. I later told him about the anti-Asian hate that people in my community faced amid the pandemic, how Chinatown boycotts affected my family’s small business, and how his words impacted me.

Importantly, I listened to him and tried not to judge his lack of awareness. The fellows in this program were from all over and haven’t had the same upbringing as I’ve had. As such, I focused on our common ground: respect. No matter where you are from, respect goes both ways, and I hoped that if I showed him respect, he would do the same. Had I scolded him, he might have put his guard up or become defensive.

Still, it’s important to know when someone is not worth your time. It is not my job or any person of color’s job to educate other people on racism. If after attempting to explain the impact of their words and actions they are unwilling to listen or change their behavior, they are not worth it.

And to the white allies, it is natural to protect someone you care about. It comes with good intentions, and in many cases, your voice and actions are appreciated. But sometimes, the person who was targeted might want to respond directly. I encourage you to yield to them in these situations.

I applied to the fellowship intent on learning more about international diplomacy and global affairs. I never expected it to be my introduction to direct racism. The experience, while sometimes painful, has made me more thankful for my New York City upbringing and more sympathetic to those who don’t have the privilege of growing up in such an accepting and diverse community.

Landing back in New York City, I found myself paying closer attention to the communities that I travel through. From Manhattan’s Little Italy and Koreatown to Flushing, Queens, home to Chinese, Indian, Jewish, Hispanic, and many other communities, I have a newfound appreciation for the beautiful ethnic enclaves that make up my hometown.

Vanessa Chen is a rising high school senior who loves to write and read in her free time. She has organized community events, including gatherings where Chinatown youth can bond and protests against neighborhood displacement. In school, Vanessa serves as executive producer for her school’s theater community and last fall produced the musical, “Matilda.”

Teachers sue over Tennessee law restricting what they can teach about race, gender, and bias

2023-07-26T18:58:23+00:00

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Tennessee’s largest teacher organization has joined with five public school educators to legally challenge a 2-year-old state law restricting what they can teach about race, gender, and bias in their classrooms.

Their lawsuit, which was filed late Tuesday in a federal court in Nashville by lawyers for the Tennessee Education Association, maintains the language in the 2021 law is unconstitutionally vague and that the state’s enforcement plan is subjective.

The complaint also charges that Tennessee’s so-called “prohibited concepts” law interferes with instruction on difficult but important topics included in the state’s academic standards. Those standards outline state-approved learning goals, which dictate other decisions around curriculum and testing.

The lawsuit is the first legal challenge to the controversial state law that was among the first of its kind in the nation. The law passed amid a conservative backlash to America’s reckoning over racism after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis and subsequent anti-racist protests.

Rep. John Ragan of Oak Ridge, one of the Republican sponsors of the legislation, argued the law was needed to protect K-12 students from being “indoctrinated” with social concepts that he and other lawmakers considered misguided and divisive such as critical race theory. That academic framework, which surveys of teachers suggest are not being taught in K-12 schools, is more commonly found in higher education to examine how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism.

Tennessee’s GOP-controlled legislature overwhelmingly passed the legislation in the final days of their 2021 session, just days after the bill’s introduction. Gov. Bill Lee quickly signed it into law, and later that year, the state education department set rules for enforcement. If found in violation, teachers can be stripped of their licenses and school districts can lose state funding.

Only a small number of complaints have been filed and no penalties levied during the law’s first two years on the books. But Ragan has introduced new legislation that would widen eligibility for who can file a complaint.

The lawsuit seeks to overturn the law and asks for a court order against its enforcement.

The complaint claims the statute fails to give Tennessee educators a reasonable opportunity to understand what conduct and teachings are prohibited.

“Teachers are in this gray area where we don’t know what we can and can’t do or say in our classrooms,” said Kathryn Vaughn, a veteran teacher in Tipton County, near Memphis, and one of five educators who are plaintiffs in the case.

“The rollout of the law — from guidance to training — has been almost nonexistent,” Vaughn added. “That’s put educators in an impossible position.”

The lawsuit also charges the law encourages arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement and violates the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids any state from “depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”

“Laws need to be clear,” said Tanya Coats, president of the teachers group known as TEA, which is leading the litigation.

She said educators have spent “countless hours” trying to understand the law and the 14 concepts banned from the classroom — including that the United States is “fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist;” or that an individual, by virtue of their race or sex, “bears responsibility” for past actions committed by other members of the same race or sex.

TEA says the ambiguity of those concepts has had a chilling effect in schools — from how teachers answer a student’s question to what materials they read in class. To avoid the risk of time-consuming complaints and potential penalties from the state, school leaders have made changes to instruction and school activities. But ultimately, it’s students who suffer, Coats said.

“This law interferes with Tennessee teachers’ job to provide a fact-based, well-rounded education to their students,” Coats said in a news release.

The 52-page lawsuit gives specific examples of how the ban is affecting what nearly a million public school students are learning — and not learning — daily across Tennessee.

“In Tipton County, for example, one school has replaced an annual field trip to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis with a trip to a baseball game. In Shelby County, a choir director fears that his decades-long practice of teaching his students to sing and understand the history behind spirituals sung by enslaved people will be perceived as ‘divisive’ or otherwise violative of the Ban,” the suit says. Other districts have removed books from their curriculum as a result of the law.

The governor’s office typically does not comment on pending litigation, but Lee’s press secretary, Jade Byers, provided this statement on Wednesday in response to the lawsuit: “The governor signed the legislation because every parent deserves transparency into their child’s education, and Tennessee students should be taught history and civics with facts, not divisive political commentary.”

Tennessee targeted anti-CRT policies early

Tennessee was among the first states to pass a law limiting the depth of classroom discussions about inequality and concepts such as white privilege.

In March, Tennessee’s education department reported that few complaints had been filed with local school districts based on the law. And the department had received only a few appeals of local decisions.

One was from the parent of a student enrolled in a private school in Davidson County. Because the law does not apply to private schools, the department found that the parent did not have standing to file an appeal under the law.

Another complaint was filed by a Blount County parent over the book “Dragonwings,” a novel told from the perspective of a Chinese immigrant boy in the early 20th century. The state denied the appeal based on the results of its investigation.

However, Blount County Schools still removed the book from its sixth grade curriculum. And the lawsuit described the emotional toll of the proceedings on a 45-year teaching veteran who was “entangled in months of administrative proceedings, with her job on the line, because of a single parent’s complaint about an award-winning work of young adult literature that the Tennessee Department of Education approved and the local elected school board adopted as part of the district’s curriculum.”

The department also declined to investigate a complaint from Williamson County, south of Nashville, filed soon after the law was enacted. Robin Steenman, chair of the local Moms for Liberty chapter, alleged the literacy curriculum “Wit and Wisdom,” used by Williamson County Schools in 2020-21, has a “heavily biased agenda” that makes children “hate their country, each other and/or themselves.”

A spokesman said the department was only authorized to investigate claims beginning with the 2021-22 school year and encouraged Steenman to work with Williamson County Schools to resolve her concerns.

Department officials did not immediately respond Wednesday when asked whether the state has received more appeals in recent months.

Meanwhile, critics of the law worry about new legislative efforts to broaden its application.

Under the state’s current rules, only students, parents, or employees within a district or charter school can file complaints involving their school. Ragan’s bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Joey Hensley of Hohenwald, would allow any resident within a public school zone to file a complaint.

But critics argue such a change would open the door to conservative groups, like Moms for Liberty, to flood their local school boards with complaints about instruction, books, or materials they believe violate the law, even if they do not have direct contact with the teacher or school in question.

The prohibited concepts law is separate from 2022 Tennessee law that, based on appeals of local school board decisions, empowers a state panel to ban school library books statewide if deemed “inappropriate for the age or maturity levels” of students.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include comments from the governor’s office and one of the plaintiffs.

Marta W. Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

The ‘Tennessee 3’ created a historic teachable moment. Will schools be allowed to teach it?

2023-06-16T19:34:07+00:00

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When Wyatt Bassow and Ava Buxton missed classes one morning this spring to see democracy in action in Tennessee, they witnessed history that they acknowledged probably wouldn’t be fully taught at their high school less than a mile away.

Justin Pearson, one of two young Democratic lawmakers who were dramatically expelled from office just a week earlier by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, was taking his oath of office again that day outside the state Capitol in Nashville after being voted back in by officials in Shelby County.

A few days earlier, Rep. Justin Jones of Nashville had been reinstated after a similar vote by his city’s council.

Both men had been ousted from the legislature for staging a protest on the House floor urging gun reforms after a mass school shooting in Nashville. The votes temporarily robbed some 140,000 Tennesseans in the state’s two largest cities of their representation.

“What I’ve learned these last few weeks is that democracy is incredibly fragile,” said Bassow, a senior at Nashville’s Hume-Fogg High School, as he cheered Pearson’s reinstatement in the shadow of the Capitol building.

“But because of the power of the people,” he added, “we were able to fix this.”

Less certain, the students said, is whether the controversial ouster of the two young Black Democrats by the House’s all-white GOP supermajority would be fully discussed at their school, or any public Tennessee school, as part of a course in U.S. government, civics, history, contemporary issues, or social studies.

While Republican leaders maintain the ouster was not racially motivated, the racial optics were undeniable, as was the supermajority’s suppression of legislative voices with whom they disagreed.

Cameron Sexton, a Republican from Crossville, is the speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

Meanwhile, Tennessee is at the front of a conservative-driven wave of censorship about what can and cannot be taught in K-12 schools.

A 2021 state law restricts classroom discussions about systemic racism, white privilege, and the ongoing legacy of slavery. Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who signed the law, has championed civics education that emphasizes American exceptionalism and plays down the origins of present-day U.S. injustices.

School libraries are under scrutiny too, especially for materials that have to do with race and gender. A 2022 law gives the state unprecedented authority to overrule local school boards and remove certain materials from libraries statewide. And a 2023 law puts book distributors and publishers at risk of criminal prosecution if materials they provide to Tennessee schools are deemed obscene.

“We definitely have noticed that a silencing is happening in our schools.” —Ava Buxton, student

“We definitely have noticed that a silencing is happening in our schools,” said Buxton, also a senior at Hume-Fogg, when asked whether the expulsions of Jones and Pearson had been discussed in her classes.

“Thankfully, our teachers are wonderful and intelligent educators who do their best to give students the space we need to have important conversations,” she continued. “But I think these conversations would go much deeper if our teachers didn’t have the fear of these new laws hanging over them.”

The rise, fall, and rise of the Tennessee Three

The expulsions of the two Black lawmakers came during the dramatic last weeks of a tumultuous legislative session gripped by large citizen protests over Tennessee’s lax gun laws, after an armed intruder killed three children and three adults at The Covenant School in Nashville on March 27.

Frustrated that House Speaker Cameron Sexton was not allowing them to voice the concerns of demonstrators during debates, Pearson, Jones, and Rep. Gloria Johnson of Knoxville took their protest to the House floor, where Jones and Pearson alternately used a bullhorn to shout “Gun control now!” and “Power to the people!”

In the process, the trio broke the chamber’s rules of decorum. GOP-sponsored ouster resolutions accused the so-called Tennessee Three of “knowingly and intentionally bringing disorder and dishonor to the House of Representatives.”

(From left) Reps. Justin Jones of Nashville, Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, and Justin Pearson of Memphis speak at a press conference on April 4, 2023, about GOP-sponsored resolutions to kick the three Democrats out of office.

Ultimately, Republican representatives voted overwhelmingly to kick out the two young Black men, while Johnson, who is older and white and was less vocal during the protest, kept her seat by a single vote.

The last time the House had expelled multiple members was in 1866, when six representatives were thrown out for conspiring to deprive the chamber of a quorum during a special session to ratify the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Two others have been expelled in more recent times, one for soliciting a bribe, and the other for sexual misconduct.

By contrast, the ousters of Jones and Pearson over their peaceful protest of gun violence — now the No. 1 killer of children and teens in America — seemed heavy-handed to their supporters. The House could have chosen simply to censure them for breaking House rules of decorum instead of kicking them out altogether.

In a subsequent four-page rebuke, the nation’s professional organization for social studies teachers denounced Tennessee’s House as attacking foundational principles of democratic and republican norms. Intentionally or not, the state was sending Tennessee students a message that the rights to free speech, peaceful protest, and holding their elected officials accountable are “reserved for those who have a specific view or perspective,” the National Council for the Social Studies wrote.

“Just as disturbing,” the group continued, “this action sends a message to the larger community that civil discourse and active citizenship will result in punishment rather than in finding consensus in ways that uphold the principles of democracy and the functioning of our republic … (which) will have a long-term impact on our students’ faith in the democratic process and our constitutional principles.”

Tennessee’s living history drama was filled with teachable moments

Political science and social studies experts say it’s hard to narrow down the events in Tennessee this spring to one teachable moment.

Tens of thousands of citizens descending on the Capitol to protest gun violence after a school shooting and the subsequent expulsions and reinstatements of Jones and Pearson are rich runways for academic inquiry. Among the issues: freedom of speech, legislative rules of decorum, the enduring influence of racism on public policy, and — as Bassow, the Nashville student, articulated — the fragility of democracy.

Students protest outside the Tennessee State Capitol on April 3, 2023, during a demonstration against gun violence and the state’s lax gun laws after a deadly school shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville.

John Geer, a political science professor who helped to launch the Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy, heartily agrees with Bassow.

“The teachable moment is that democracy fundamentally rests on genuine competition among political parties,” said Geer. “But because of supermajorities in our state legislatures, the minority party has no real influence and is left to scream or complain. They’re not part of the governing process. There’s no give and take, no compromise. Meanwhile, the majority party has so much power that they don’t need to negotiate, and that leads to excesses.”

It didn’t take long for resources to become available to help teachers broach the controversies in Tennessee as well as in Montana, where that state’s House speaker silenced Democratic Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a transgender lawmaker who refused to apologize for telling colleagues they would have “blood” on their hands if they supported a ban on gender-affirming care for youths.

Facing History and Ourselves, a nonprofit group that creates resources about current events to spawn thoughtful classroom discussions, zeroed in on two issues in its lessons: how to discuss politics in non-polarizing ways and the implications of using rules of decorum to censure legislators.

“What norms should guide our conversations about political issues?” asks the group’s lessons designed for middle and high school students.

“How could rules around speech be used to silence people?”

Parameters have narrowed on what teachers can teach

The availability of resources doesn’t mean such questions are being regularly asked in Tennessee classrooms, however.

The state’s public school teachers don’t have much wiggle room on what they’re allowed to teach. They’re also under increased scrutiny over the resources they can use.

“Tennessee civics is really nowhere in the standards. If something isn’t in the standards, it’s probably not going to be taught.” —Bill Carey, Tennessee History for Kids

Teachers are guided by hundreds of state-approved academic standards that set learning goals by subject and grade, and that dictate decisions around curriculum and testing. And social studies teachers already are hard-pressed to cover all of the standards for their subjects during a single school year. Even if they do, only a few courses offered in grades five, eight, and 12 include standards that might lend themselves to discussions about the Tennessee Three.

“Tennessee civics is really nowhere in the standards,” said Bill Carey, who sells resources for educators through his nonprofit Tennessee History for Kids. “And if something isn’t in the standards, it’s probably not going to be taught.”

Social studies lessons, in particular, are monitored closely by parents and activists.

In 2015, some complained that some Tennessee teachers were “indoctrinating” students into Islam in their seventh-grade world history classes, prompting state officials to order an early review of those standards.

More recently, amid a conservative backlash to anti-racism protests after a white policeman killed Black American George Floyd in Minneapolis (an incident that prompted a federal investigation into systemic racism on the police force), Tennessee was among the first states to enact a law intended to restrict K-12 classroom discussions about race, racism, and gender.

Specifically, the 2021 law prohibits teachers from discussing 14 concepts that the state has deemed divisive, including that the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably sexist or racist, or that an individual is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive because of their race or gender.

Educators have complained that the law and the state’s rules for enforcing the statute aren’t clear about exactly what teachings cross the line. But teachers found in violation could have their licenses suspended or revoked, while their school districts could face financial penalties.

“To be honest, I just didn’t mention this in class. I am just overly cautious with what I cover in class for now.” —Tennessee social studies teacher

The potential fallout has influenced small but pivotal decisions that educators make every day in Tennessee and in other states that have passed similar laws targeting so-called critical race theory: how to answer a student’s question, which articles to read as a class, how to prepare for a lesson, which examples to use.

That includes whether to discuss the Tennessee legislature’s vote to expel Jones and Pearson, which made national headlines.

“To be honest, I just didn’t mention this in class,” said one Tennessee social studies teacher who asked not to be identified, for fear of retribution. “I am just overly cautious with what I cover in class for now.”

Students ‘come up with all these great questions’

Mark Finchum, executive director of the Tennessee Council for the Social Studies, says the law — and a related climate of fear — has had a chilling effect on teachers who might normally contemplate lessons about the Tennessee Three, or perhaps about the insurrection at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. But it also depends on the teacher.

“If you’re a new teacher who is teaching in an area of the state where you feel insecure, you may not want to go there,” Finchum said. “But if you’re an experienced teacher and feel strongly about these events and how your students can learn from them, you may go ahead.”

Erika Sugarmon falls in the latter category.

One Friday at White Station High School in Memphis, students showed up to Sugarmon’s weekly current events discussion with lots of questions about the expulsion. The day before the legislative vote, many White Station students had walked out of school to show support for gun reforms called for by the Tennessee Three.

“The kids come up with all these great questions. Sometimes there’s not an answer,” said Sugarmon, a veteran educator who teaches courses in U.S. government.

Protesters listen from the gallery of the House of Representatives at the Tennessee State Capitol on April 3, 2023, while demanding gun reform and justice for The Tennessee Three.

But it’s important to give students a safe and constructive space to discuss hard things, added Sugarmon, who is also an elected official on the Shelby County Commission, where she cast a vote to reinstate Pearson to his seat.

One student in her class brought up racism, she said, prompting a conversation about why Tennessee lawmakers have sought to ban some books and squelch classroom discussions about racism.

“Students have been very vocal about not just what happened with Pearson, but with state laws in general,” said Sugarmon.

She encourages them to explore source documents to formulate their own options.

Evidence-based discussions are the way that teachers should take up politically charged topics with their students, Vanderbilt’s Geer said.

“The evidence should be your guidepost,” he said, “while avoiding injecting ideology into the classroom.”

“Yes, facts need to be interpreted,” Geer added. “But if we can agree on a basic set of evidence, we can have a conversation. And that’s an important part of democracy.”

Maya Logan, a rising senior in Memphis at Germantown High School, talked about the lawmakers’ expulsions with her friends, but didn’t discuss the event as part of her 11th-grade American history class. Just the same, the deadly shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School, which prompted the protest and led to the expulsions, was a big deal to her. And as a young Black person, she related to Pearson and Jones, who are among the youngest members of the House.

Logan hopes this year’s events at the state Capitol will resurface as discussion topics during her senior year when she takes a U.S. government class. She has important questions. And she’s looking for answers.

“These are people,” she explained, “that are setting things up for us for our futures.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Laura Testino is a reporter for Chalkbeat Tennessee, where she covers K-12 education in Memphis. Contact her at ltestino@chalkbeat.org.

I was hired to write a Black history curriculum. Then I was asked to walk back key concepts.

2023-06-12T11:00:00+00:00

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In 2020, I was approached on LinkedIn about working with an organization to create a Black history and social justice course curriculum for high school students. They sought me out because of my previous commentaries about teaching Black history. I told them I was interested, and they asked me to draft a prospectus for such a course.

What I provided was a philosophical overview of what a social justice and Black history course could look like. I wanted no misunderstanding about the educator they’d be partnering with and the language that I use to teach my students. So I told them that I wanted students to leave this class understanding the United States is a white settler colonized state, built by way of racial capitalism to enrich “white people” of European descent above everyone else.

Rann Miller

When they brought me on, I believed that it was a real opportunity to expose students to the truth they had not previously learned in their history classes.

While the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor months earlier weren’t the first time the U.S. was confronted with the systemic racism of policing, the protest movement that followed seemed to mark an inflection point. The 1619 Project had just won a Pulitzer Prize. A reckoning seemed on the horizon. That was the backdrop against which I, then optimistically naive, got to work.

I was primarily responsible for the content of the course, with others handling the packaging of the course. I took the responsibility very seriously. My students have often asked me why they hadn’t learned what Arturo Schomburg called the missing pages of history prior to attending my history classes. That question served as a guide. I asked questions such as “What is whiteness, and did it exist before the formation of the United States?” and “What is American exceptionalism, and how does it show itself in popular culture?”

The initial feedback that I received was positive. I was supported and encouraged to continue down the path I was going, and I believed that the completion of this work would transform the minds of the course participants.

But by the following year, I realized the racial reckoning was not to be. There had been no effort to address systemic racism in earnest, which would require a dramatic reorganization of our social, political, and economic orders. What happened instead was an insurrection at the start of the year. What happened instead was a backlash to protests against police brutality. What happened instead were voter suppression policies and legislation banning Critical Race Theory in curriculums and professional training.

Such backlash spilled into my curriculum work.

About halfway through the development of the curriculum, I was informed that what I had created so far presented a client sensitivity issue. Words and concepts and topics such as white supremacy, intersectionality, and racial capitalism would make it difficult for the curriculum to be sold in states that experienced backlash to Critical Race Theory, the company spearheading the curriculum explained.

Initially, I was confused because the ones delivering the news were the very people who had complimented my work up until this point.

I was asked to remove certain terms and concepts, like intersectionality, in favor of a trajectory that explored justice without explicit mention of these words. I was also asked not to phrase these concepts in a way that acknowledged them as established truth. Rather than saying white supremacy has done harm to the United States, for example, I was asked to say that some individuals argue that white supremacy has done harm to the United States.

I flat-out disagreed. But after a spirited back and forth, I agreed to stick with the project because I accepted the idea that compromise was better than students, namely white students, not receiving any instruction that challenged their idea of history. So I went back to work but no longer approached it with the same excitement as before.

I believed that it was a real opportunity to expose students to the truth.

The labor was split between myself and other curriculum writers to expedite the development process. I rededicated myself to submitting work rooted in truth, and that’s just what the folks received. Some of those words and phrases they asked me to remove remained. But once I submitted my work, decisions around what to include (and what to excise) were out of my hands.

In the end, the completed course flirted with ideas of identity and injustice — and how we ought to respect the identities of others — but without any specific call to antiracism or anticapitalism. Certainly, perfection can be the enemy of good. But in the case of teaching Black history, compromise, I realize now, is an assault on justice.

Black educators who want to entrench Black history in mainstream school curriculums have struggled with doing so for more than a century. It’s in large part due to white sensitivity to the truth — a truth that implicates their ancestors, their history, and their sense of self in crimes against humanity. This is true dating back to the dawn of the 20th century when seminal writings by the likes of historian Carter G. Woodson and sociologist W.E.B. DuBois were often kept out of classrooms where Black students learned.

And we witness this in real time, too, with the College Board’s botching of the AP African American Studies course. I should consider myself in good company.

Looking back on the experience, I am not angry. I am resolute. Since that time, I have published ”Resistance Stories from Black History for Kids.” It does just what I wanted that curriculum to do: teach the truth. The goal of our collective work is not to create a world where we, Black people, are the oppressors and white people suffer. The goal is to equip young people to, one day, eradicate systems of oppression altogether. I believe that our efforts are not in vain, for as Frederick Douglass explained, where there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Rann Miller is an educator and freelance writer based in New Jersey. His Urban Education Mixtape blog supports urban educators and parents of children attending urban schools. He is the author of “Resistance Stories from Black History for Kids” (Ulysses Press), available everywhere, including Mahogany Books. Follow him on Twitter @RealRannMiller.

Civil rights icon Ruby Bridges says reading festivals can counteract book bans

2023-05-16T16:56:50+00:00

In elementary school several years ago, Olivia Shackelford read about how 6-year-old Ruby Bridges endured racial slurs, ostracism, and death threats for integrating an all-white elementary school in New Orleans in 1960.

Groups such as Moms for Liberty that try to get books about race banned from schools say that reading such stories can traumatize children.

But Bridges’ story didn’t traumatize Olivia, her mother said. Instead, it energized her desire to learn more about the history of racism in America and the sacrifices of people like Bridges.

“She read about Ruby Bridges and the impact she had on integration, and she was obsessed, for years, with meeting her,” said Stephanie Shackelford, who brought Olivia, now 13, and her two other daughters, Cassidy and Blue, to the Ruby Bridges Reading Festival at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis on Saturday.

“We’re from Cabot, Arkansas, and found out that this was going on in Memphis, so she finally got a chance to meet her.”

As Tennessee, Florida, Texas and other states remove books that recount painful periods in history from school shelves, Bridges said that book festivals like the one that bears her name will be key to helping children like Olivia learn about the history of racism in America.

According to a report by PEN America, a group that champions freedom of expression through literature, 1,477 instances of book banning occurred in the first half of the 2022-23 school year, up 28% from the previous year.

And while Florida and Texas led with the most bans, Tennessee law is also making it easier for local authorities to ban books — including titles like Bridges’ own “Ruby Bridges Goes to School,” which a parents group in Williamson County objected to.

Bridges spent part of Saturday afternoon signing her newest children’s book, “I Am Ruby Bridges: How One Six-Year-Old Girl’s March to School Changed the World,” and others. Before that, she spoke to reporters about how her story wound up being the target of book bans, what must be done to combat them, and why stories like hers are especially important during this time.

Here are some highlights:

On her first book, “Ruby Bridges Goes to School,” becoming the target of book bans:

“I try to write my books in an uplifting way. My books have been truthful, and I do uplift everyone who was involved (in her integration effort): my teacher, who was white, my psychologist, who was white, the federal marshals who supported me, the people around the country who supported me.

“(But) they said the reason my books were being banned was because it made young white kids feel bad about themselves. So, for them to say that, that’s ridiculous. So, when they started targeting me, I couldn’t ignore it. Then I got a call from Congress asking me if I would speak about it.”

(Bridges spoke against Texas book bans during a House Oversight Committee hearing in 2022).

“Once my books are pulled down, you probably should expect that a lot more would follow. But if you’re banning my books because they’re too truthful, then why don’t we start having a conversation about the books that we force our young people to study, like the textbooks we know omit so much of the truth?

“So, if we’re going to ban my books, let’s take them all off the shelves and start anew.”

On what parents and communities should do to fight book bans:

“I think this festival speaks to that. We need to all come together to make sure books are available to kids, and to grow more reading festivals.

“I believe that if we’re going to get past our racial differences, we can’t do it alone. There was a time when we, as African-Americans, couldn’t be caught with a book, or couldn’t let people know we knew how to read. But we’ve come a long way from that, and it seems like we could be heading in that direction again if books are being banned.

On why the racism she endured as a 6-year-old is important to children’s understanding of history:

“I was recently asked to speak at a conference based on history. I was thinking about what I wanted to say about history. Then I thought about how I had to get on a plane to travel from Louisiana to D.C.

U.S. marshals escort Ruby Bridges to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960.

“I thought about how I arrived and made it safely, but someone in another plane didn’t (because of a plane crash).

“When that happened, they had to send a plane crew to the wreckage, to go through that wreckage, and to find that little black box.

“Can you imagine what those people must have seen going to that site, going to that wreckage, to get that little black box? Why was that box so important? It was the history that little black box held to make sure that I, on the next flight, would arrive safely.

“If history works for something like that, what makes us think it won’t work for racism — to rid us of racism? If we tell the truth — good, bad, or ugly — if we teach that it happened, then maybe history will move us past our racial differences.”

On how being a civil rights icon propelled her to become a writer and literacy advocate:

“I never dreamed that I would become an author myself, but writing my own story made me realize that I didn’t just want to give books away to kids, but to inspire them to write. I hope this festival can help do that.”

Bureau Chief Tonyaa Weathersbee oversees Chalkbeat Tennessee’s education coverage. Reach her at tweathersbee@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee school employees could skip implicit-bias training under bill headed to governor’s desk

2023-04-22T01:00:16+00:00

A bill allowing Tennessee school and university employees to opt out of implicit-bias training is headed to Gov. Bill Lee’s desk.

The measure easily passed Friday in the Republican-controlled Senate and House over the objections of Democrats who argued that the policy is the wrong direction in a state where students of color make up about 40% of Tennessee’s public school population, while the vast majority of the state’s teachers are white.

The legislation is the latest example of the legislature’s efforts to stifle or silence conversations about diversity in education.

In 2021, Tennessee became one of the nation’s first to enact a law limiting how race and gender can be discussed in the classroom, including conversations about systemic racism. Last year, the legislature passed another law that could lead to a statewide ban of certain school library books, some of which deal with matters of race and gender.

Implicit-bias training is designed to increase self-awareness around subconscious prejudices and stereotypes that may affect how individuals see and treat people of another race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background.

A significant amount of research in education says that implicit biases may contribute to racial disparities, such as differences in student achievement, learning opportunities, and school discipline between Black and white students. But it’s less clear whether training about implicit bias actually changes behaviors.

In Tennessee, it has been up to local school districts, charter schools, and public universities to determine whether to offer or require implicit-bias training for their employees.

Sen. Todd Gardenhire said his bill doesn’t ban schools from offering the training or employees from participating. It just protects school employees from disciplinary action or firing if they choose to opt out.

“You want to have that course, have it all day long, but don’t make me do it,” said the Chattanooga Republican.

But Democrats worried that those who opt out might be the ones most in need of self-reflection, based on research that says, for instance, that teachers are more likely to discipline Black children than white children for the same conduct, or give boys higher grades in math than girls.

“This is simply to give our educators another tool to make sure that all students are treated with equity and dignity and respect,” said Rep. Justin Jones, a Nashville Democrat.

Gardenhire and the bill’s House sponsor, Rep. Jason Zachary of Knoxville, charged that some trainings in Tennessee have crossed the line beyond building self-awareness into ideologically driven presentations that are themselves rooted in biases.

“All of this depends on a developer or a designer that designs the course. But who checks the checker?” Gardenhire asked.

In House debate, Rep. Sam McKenzie, a Knoxville Democrat who voted against the bill, suggested that instead of the state letting employees opt out, trainers and their courses should be screened to ensure they represent best practices in implicit-bias training.

And in the Senate, Sen. Jeff Yarbro said the purpose of implicit-bias training isn’t to make people feel bad about themselves but to educate people who work with students to avoid stereotypes.

“The data is 100% clear that implicit bias is a real thing that has real effects in classrooms across the country,” said the Nashville Democrat, “and certainly Tennessee is no exception.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee bill would widen who can complain about teaching of banned concepts

2023-03-17T21:17:43+00:00

Few complaints have been filed — and no penalties levied — since 2021 when Tennessee enacted a controversial law that seeks to regulate discussions on race and gender in K-12 classrooms.

But that could change under new GOP legislation that state lawmakers are scheduled to take up next week.

The bill, filed by Rep. John Ragan of Oak Ridge and Sen. Joey Hensley of Hohenwald, would allow any resident within a public school zone to file a complaint under Tennessee’s so-called prohibited concepts law, which restricts teachers from discussing 14 concepts that the legislature has deemed divisive.

Currently, only students, parents, or employees within a district or charter school can file complaints involving their school, which can lead to disciplinary action. If the state determines that educators have violated the law, teachers can even be stripped of their licenses and school districts can lose state funding.

The proposed change, which observers have dubbed “Prohibited Concepts 2.0,” could open the door to conservative groups like Moms for Liberty to flood their local school boards with complaints about instruction, books, or materials they believe violate the law, even if they do not have direct contact with the teacher or school in question. The organization, with chapters in seven Tennessee counties, has channeled the frustrations of conservative mothers to target issues like mask mandates and curricula that touch on LGBTQ rights, race, and discrimination.

Ragan says investigations should weed out unfounded claims and that he’s more concerned about “taxation without representation.”

“These people are taxpayers who are footing the bill for schools,” he said, “so they should have the right to file a complaint.”

However, the law’s detractors say the change would make a dangerous policy even more dangerous.

“This will place an even greater burden on district personnel to have to chase down complaints,” said Gini Pupo-Walker, state director for the Education Trust in Tennessee. “And it’s going to have another chilling effect on what teachers can teach and how they teach it.”

The legislation is the latest effort by Tennessee conservatives to tamp down on classroom discussions that veer into ideas like systemic racism, sexism, and gender identity, even as the law has generated few formal complaints thus far.

Critics say it’s another attempt to weaponize public education in the current political climate by using charged words such as “indoctrination” to stoke parents’ fears and inflame disagreements about which classroom discussions are appropriate and which ones cross the line.

Few appeals filed, no penalties levied so far

Tennessee was among the first states to enact a prohibited concepts law amid national fury from conservatives about critical race theory, an academic framework that’s sometimes studied in higher education to examine how policies and laws may perpetuate systemic racism.

After reviewing more than 900 public comments about the new law, the state education department developed enforcement rules for everything from how to file and investigate a complaint to how to appeal a decision and what penalties that teachers and districts could face if found in violation of the law. Those rules also set who is eligible to file a complaint.

Since the rules went into effect in late 2021, the department has received two appeals of local decisions, according to spokesman Brian Blackley.

One was filed by a Blount County parent over the book “Dragonwings,” a novel told from the perspective of a Chinese immigrant boy in the early 20th century. The state denied the appeal based on the results of its investigation, Blackley said.

The second was from the parent of a student enrolled in a private school in Davidson County. Because the law does not apply to private schools, the department found that the parent did not have standing to file an appeal under the law.

Blackley said the department was only authorized to investigate claims beginning with the 2021-22 school year and encouraged Steenman to work with Williamson County Schools to resolve her concerns.

State rules were set after lengthy public comment process

Steenman was also among hundreds of Tennesseans who wrote the department in 2021 about its pending rules. She asked the state to widen eligibility to file a complaint under the new law.

“Under this rule, our current complaint gets tossed out again (because) I’m not a parent of a currently enrolled student,” she wrote. “Never mind that I am speaking on behalf of hundreds of parents of currently enrolled students! And what about grandparents? How many grandparents are in this group in the defense of their grandchildren?”

Others urged the state to limit eligibility to those who interact directly with the educators they might complain about — criteria that the department went with in its enforcement rules.

But Ragan, the House bill’s sponsor, contends the department missed the mark on complaint eligibility.

“I wrote the original bill. I established the legislative intent. They ignored it,” he told Chalkbeat. “This newest bill would carry out what I originally intended.”

To address concerns of unfounded complaints, the bill says a resident who files a complaint must have “actual or constructive knowledge of the violation.”

Asked whether he’s concerned that time-consuming investigations could distract district personnel from their core duties, Ragan was unapologetic.

“Our system of government is not constrained by how long it takes or how tough it is on employees to do their job,” he said. “That’s what we hire them for.”

His legislation also would require districts and the state to publish on their websites the outcomes of their investigations, as well as “the department’s rationale for upholding or overturning” an appeal.

A chilling effect

The bigger goal, Ragan says, is to encourage teachers and school leaders to review and adjust their instructional practices before a complaint is filed.

While he has called for “facts-based teaching based on the state’s academic standards,” The Education Trust views Ragan’s bigger goal as essentially censorship.

“As a former history teacher, I can say that this law has teachers thinking very carefully about a whole list of topics in their classroom going forward,” said Pupo-Walker. “Portraying slavery in a neutral fashion or the Holocaust in a neutral fashion seems completely absurd, but that is the expectation of lawmakers who support this kind of legislation.”

For instance, after investigating the parent’s complaint in Blount County, the Knoxville-area district announced last August that excerpts from the novel “Dragonwings” would be optional for sixth grade teachers to include in instruction this school year.

In Williamson County, where local complaints about “Wit & Wisdom” led to a months-long review of English language arts curriculum in the its elementary schools, the district removed one fourth grade book, the Newbery Award-winning “Walk Two Moons,” and made “instructional adjustments” to seven other texts.

“Ultimately, this process is tearing at the fabric of connections between schools and communities and their families. It implies that you can’t trust teachers with your children,” said Pupo-Walker.

“Parents know implicitly that’s just not the case with the teachers in their children’s schools,” she added. “But this onslaught of bills is undermining people’s confidence in the intention and the integrity of our educators. It’s destructive.”

You can track the bill on the General Assembly’s website.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Once an unaccompanied minor, this college student now fights for immigration reform

2023-03-02T23:03:06+00:00

Leer en español.

Edna Chavez knows what it was like to flee her country alone as a teenager. She knows what it was like to make the risky and lonely trek north, to cross the border illegally and be held as an unaccompanied minor in shelters and detention centers.

But the 21-year-old student considers herself among a lucky few, because later she was adopted.

That support allowed her to pursue her education and put her on track for legal permanent residency.

Chavez has met many students with similar backgrounds, but who have no path to citizenship, who have limited education or work prospects, and who have endured discrimination. Chavez wants to do something about it.

“We have to make a radical change in our community, we can’t keep hiding,” Chavez said. “It’s time that someone does something. And that someone has to be me.”

Chavez is planning a rally, which she’s dubbed Students Stand Up for Immigration Reform, on March 11 at the State Capitol.

The rally was her idea, but she has gotten support from immigrant advocacy groups that are helping her coordinate. If enough students need transportation to the Capitol, she will look for ways to provide it.

She is also asking students to write letters and sign a petition asking Congress to renew the provisions of the Immigration Act of 1929. The act was intended to provide a way for immigrants who have been in the country for many years to earn legal status. But its required dates for entry haven’t been updated recently, so most immigrants do not qualify. Previous updates granted amnesty to some immigrants during the Reagan administration.

Updating the act would give many more immigrants a path to legal status and many more young people a way to pursue an education.

“What I really want is for all students to show up to demonstrate that we are better united,” Chavez said. “Together we are strong.”

Chavez is full of hope because she has already overcome so many barriers.

Back home in Guatemala, Chavez said she was fighting against men who tried to force her into prostitution. She felt unsafe and decided one day at age 17 to flee to the U.S. without telling her parents.

Her abusive father wouldn’t have helped, she feared. Even now, her relationship with him is strained.

After a long and dangerous journey, Chavez was confined for months in detention centers and later a shelter for unaccompanied minors. When she turned 18, she was removed from the youth shelter and sent back to a detention center. Then an advocate found a family willing to sponsor her. After she moved in with them, they formally adopted her.

When Chavez moved to Denver at age 18, she enrolled at GALS, a Denver charter school.

Back in Guatemala, she had been forced to drop out of school after second grade. When she started school in the U.S., she didn’t speak English. A year after enrolling in high school, the pandemic shut down school buildings. That meant she also was forced to learn technology on top of everything else so she could continue working toward her diploma online.

But she managed to graduate earlier than planned, last spring.

“Basically I knew nothing,” Chavez said. “I had a ton of obstacles, you could say that, but nothing stopped me from achieving what I had set out to achieve.”

Chavez applied to multiple universities, and was accepted at all but one. The one rejection didn’t deter her because after having visited the Colorado State University campus in Fort Collins, she knew that’s where she wanted to go.

“I felt like I belonged in that place,” she said.

She started college with a few credits she had earned while in high school. Now she’s working on a math degree with a concentration in actuarial sciences.

She said that being successful means having a good education, and then being able to give back to her community.

But she isn’t waiting to give back. She says she’s discovered a passion for helping others. Her mom back in Guatemala tells her it’s like she’s a new person.

Chavez tells her it’s because she is. Having time to spend on learning, instead of working all day, has allowed her to see the world through a different lens, she said.

“I have felt more safe. I have felt more valuable as a woman. I have felt truly fortunate to be in a country that can offer me safety,” Chavez said.

And helping others feel the most joy out of being in a place of safety matters to her.

“I’m doing it out of the love I have for the community,” Chavez said. “I’m doing it from the bottom of my heart.”

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

The racist idea that changed American education

2023-02-27T20:00:00+00:00

This story was originally published on Feb. 22 by Vox.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Subscribe to our free newsletter to keep up with how public education is changing.

Almost exactly 50 years ago, Alex Rodriguez got his 15 minutes of fame when he was in sixth grade.

Now 61, Rodriguez recalls when news media swarmed his family’s small home in west San Antonio in 1973. “There was everybody and their grandma as far as reporters all over the place,” he said. “At the school, at the house, at the neighborhood. They were just going crazy.” The TV crews had cameras, he recalls, that “were bigger than a bazooka.”

In a way, the reporters were there because of him. In 1968, his father, Demetrio, had sued the state of Texas for underfunding his son’s school district, which was predominantly made up of low-income and Mexican American families. Alex recalls the third floor of his elementary school being condemned; when it rained, water would pour down the stairs. Three or four students shared one textbook.

The lawsuit, filed by Rodriguez and a number of other parents, remarkably, had reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Civil rights groups were hoping — and some reporters expecting — it to be the “Brown vs. Board of Education of the 1970s,” as a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal put it.

But as the case wound its way through federal court, a nascent counter-idea was blossoming: Maybe, an influential cadre of social scientists claimed, it didn’t matter how much money schools spent. In fact, maybe schools weren’t actually a key factor in what students learned.

Maybe — most insidiously — poor children of color weren’t likely to succeed in school no matter how well-funded their schools. This idea was spreading, appearing in academic journals and publications like the Atlantic and the Washington Post. A New York Times news article from 1970 included this startling line: “In the case of a slum child,” it read, citing supposedly cutting-edge research, “his chances of learning to read were quite limited, even though large amounts of money might be devoted to his education.”

Fifty years ago this year, the Supreme Court cited some of that same research to rule against the Rodriguez family. The racist notion that children in poverty could not benefit from additional or even equal resources may well have influenced the court’s decision.

“The poor people have lost again, not only in Texas but in the United States, because we definitely need changes in the educational system,” Demetrio Rodriguez told one of the reporters that Alex recalls descending on their home. The media soon left, and Alex went back to the same underfunded school. “It was famous for a day or two — then that was it,” he says now.

Admittedly, the legal and practical merits of the Court’s 1973 decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez are complex and up for legitimate debate. In the long run, the ruling was not the devastating blow to funding equality efforts that many advocates feared. Funding gaps due to property taxes have narrowed or fully closed, in part because state courts stepped in after the Supreme Court stepped aside.

Still today, thanks to the Rodriguez case, the Constitution does not protect the right to an education.

But that often took decades, and the decision had a lasting impact. It left multiple generations of low-income children, like Alex Rodriguez, in schools with lesser funding. This is particularly troubling because more recent evidence has found a meaningful link between spending and student success.

Still today, thanks to the Rodriguez case, the Constitution does not protect the right to an education. A recent effort by students in Detroit to garner some federal right to quality, adequately funded schools failed. For half a century, the decision has effectively closed federal courts to students and families seeking a better education.

On a Thursday morning in May 1968, hundreds of students walked out of Edgewood High School on the west side of San Antonio. They held signs: “‘Every student in America deserves a great education. Where is ours?” “We want a gym not a barn.” “Better library, better teachers, better schools.” They marched to the superintendent’s office with a list of demands. It was a sign of the civil rights-infused times — “the era of rising expectations among minority groups like the Mexican American youngsters” of the city, as the local San Antonio Express put it.

A number of parents had joined in the protest, and soon organized the Edgewood Concerned Parents Association. “When I heard kids saying they didn’t think they could make it in college because of their high school education, then that’s when I decided it was time to do something,” one parent said.

Demetrio Rodriguez — a sheet metal worker, military veteran, and then a father of three young boys — was among those frustrated parents. The group initially targeted their ire at district officials, concerned that they were self-dealing or hoarding money. But then they met with a local lawyer, Arthur Gochman, who pointed out that the district got dramatically less funding than others in the area. Maybe the schools’ problems stemmed not from mismanagement of money, but a lack of it.

Since the advent of public education in America, property taxes had been schools’ biggest source of funding. And because property values varied dramatically from place to place, school funding did too. (Today, state funding has eclipsed local dollars for schools, reducing or even eliminating gaps in dollars due to property taxes. But disparities still exist in some places and funding often isn’t targeted to the highest-needs students. )

Nationally, the correlation between property wealth and poverty was not perfect — in some places, especially big cities, expensive property sat next to deep poverty. But the link was strong enough to create large funding gaps between school districts. In 1972, the country’s most affluent districts were spending 40% more per student than the highest-poverty districts.

The San Antonio area was a perfect example. Alamo Heights — an affluent northern part of the city, which had kept Black and Hispanic residents out through racially restrictive covenants — had nearly 10 times the taxable property value as the Edgewood school district, which served mostly low-income, Mexican American children.

The consequences, then, were preordained, and state and federal funds couldn’t make up the gap either. When all the funding was added up, in 1968 Edgewood schools received $356 per student compared to $594 in Alamo Heights, just a few miles across town.

That translated into big differences in what the schools could offer. Teachers in Edgewood were paid much less than those in Alamo Heights. Probably because of that, half of them had only substandard credentials, compared to 11% in Alamo Heights, which also had more staff per student. Class sizes in Edgewood were an average of 28 kids. Alamo Heights had a counselor for every 650 students; Edgewood had one for every 3,100. Despite being in southern Texas, just one in three Edgewood classrooms had air conditioning.

On July 10, 1968, with the support of Gochman, who took the case pro bono, Demetrio Rodriguez and several other San Antonio families filed suit against Texas’s school funding system, which they claimed violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution by discriminating against low-income, Mexican American families across the state. “I thought, I ain’t got nothing to lose,” Rodriguez said later. “Maybe we could do some good.”

But far from San Antonio, a small group of social scientists had begun to question the importance of money in public education. Instead, some researchers implied — or even stated outright — that blame for low student performance lay mostly with low-income families of color themselves.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act had included a provision requiring the federal Office of Education to produce a study on inequality in education. Many assumed it would show the need for more investment in segregated Black schools. Two years later, the federal government released the results — which stunned many educators and policymakers. The massive analysis of close to 600,000 students showed large gaps in test scores between Black and white students, but didn’t find much evidence that better schools or more funding led to higher test scores. Lagging student achievement, lead researcher James Coleman concluded, was mostly due to “the home” and “the cultural influences immediately surrounding the home,” rather than schools or money.

The study “produced the astounding proposition that the quality of the schools has only a trifling relation to achievement,” wrote politician and Harvard professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who evangelized the Coleman report, as it came to be known, in speeches and articles.

Coleman’s data set was unprecedented, but his methods for teasing out the impacts of funding on student outcomes were crude. He couldn’t follow individual students’ progress over time or isolate the effect of an infusion of funding. “Coleman’s analysis was not only wrong but generated misunderstandings that remain sadly pervasive today,” wrote Stanford professor Caroline Hoxby in a 2016 retrospective.

Nevertheless, the report soon picked up widespread attention: discussed at congressional hearings, written about in newspapers and magazines, and pored over by academics. It also drew notice because it came soon after the 1965 passage of Title I, the first major federal education funding stream and a key piece of Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty.”

Coleman’s conclusion that families mattered more than schools seemed to bolster another high-profile report of the era: “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” written by Moynihan and published in 1965. This controversial analysis claimed that a rise in single parenthood was at the heart of a “tangle of pathology” among Black families. Moynihan said the point of the report was to spur government action to support low-income Black households. But some civil rights leaders condemned the report as shifting the blame for racial inequality onto Black people.

In 1969, this implication became explicit in an academic article published by University of California Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen. He claimed that IQ is nearly fixed at birth and that, therefore, extra funding for poor and Black children was doomed to fail because of what he viewed as their genetically low intelligence. This flagrantly racist argument was a sensation, garnering widespread press coverage. “Can Negroes learn the way Whites do?” was the headline in US News. “Born Dumb?” followed Newsweek. “Intelligence: Is there a racial difference?” asked Time magazine. The New York Times Magazine sympathetically profiled Jensen, describing his “severely trying moments” of being accused of racism.

This was a sign of the times, too: The heady optimism that the federal government could quickly end poverty and educational inequality had waned. The liberal coalition that had supported civil rights and Johnson’s war on poverty had splintered, amid white backlash and the Vietnam War. Riots rippled across American cities. White intelligentsia cast about for explanations for the persistent challenges of poverty, urban unrest, and racial inequality. Some landed on a convenient, age-old answer: the deficiencies of poor people of color.

That’s how in 1970, the Times could declare a “slum child” uneducable. Similarly, a 1970 Wall Street Journal news piece said that Title I funding to help students in poverty had produced “negligible” results. Lower test scores among children of color could be explained by either “genetic or cultural” factors, the article claimed.

In the introduction to a 1971 cover story on IQ, the editors of the Atlantic claimed that Moynihan, Coleman, and Jensen’s reports — “three landmark social documents” — had collectively called into question policy efforts to address racial inequity in education and elsewhere. Getting rid of racist laws had not eliminated economic and educational inequalities — “presumably,” they wrote, “because of internal barriers.”

A 1973 front-page Washington Post story opened with this analogy: “The doctors, you might say, keep telling the parents that their child’s case is hopeless, that no amount of money or variety of remedies will add up to a cure.” The piece was accompanied by a picture of a Black student in a remedial reading class.

There were other, legitimate reasons to question the efficacy of school spending, including a 1969 report from the NAACP concluding that Title I dollars were often being misused. The Coleman report, although methodologically flawed, was among the few empirical examinations of whether more money led to better schools. The problem was that some pundits and researchers had leaped from these early results to write off the impact of schools and funding altogether.

A number of Black academics and writers tried to combat this fatalist brand of social science. “Such studies are a throwback to the nineteenth century theorists who adopted Social Darwinism — the survival of the fittest — as a means of bolstering the privileged classes of society,” wrote Vernon Jordan in the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper. “Now this old and ugly tradition is being revived.”

But this critique got much less attention from journalists and policymakers than the new educational fatalism, which had already migrated up to the White House.

Later serving as an adviser for President Richard Nixon, Moynihan sent the president an excerpt of Jensen’s paper on race and IQ, as well as two later memos that referenced Jensen’s claims. In a 1971 memo prompted by the Atlantic article on IQ, Moynihan claimed that psychologists believed that there was a “ranking of the major races” by intelligence: Asians, Caucasians, and then “Africans.” Moynihan expressed some anguish over this and described the conclusion as “not settled.” He also recommended Nixon not give up on social programs altogether.

Others were more fatalistic. White House adviser Patrick Buchanan, who later mounted bids for president, wrote a memo about the same article, saying it cast doubt on extra education spending. “Every study we have shows blacks 15 IQ points below whites on the average,” he wrote.

During a phone call with Moynihan, Nixon endorsed the idea of a racial hierarchy of intelligence. “What was said earlier by Jensen is probably very close to the truth,” said Nixon — who appointed four of the justices who, in just a few years, would decide Demetrio Rodriguez’s case.

But in 1971, three years after filing the lawsuit, Rodriguez still had good reason to be optimistic. In December, he and the other San Antonio parents won a major victory in federal court. ”The current system of financing public education in Texas discriminates on the basis of wealth,” a three-judge panel concluded unanimously. The question of whether more money could improve schools did not even come up in the decision.

Texas decided to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. The stakes were high not just in Texas, but beyond: Numerous other lawsuits had been filed against property tax–driven funding schemes across the country. But they were on a collision course with the new social science about the limits of school funding.

It was easy to miss, but phrases like “inequalities among people,” and “inadequate home life” were suggesting that children of color or children in poverty could not be expected to achieve high levels of academic performance, and so it would be fruitless to make funding more equal.

In a column for the New York Times, Moynihan wrote that while he sympathized with the Rodriguez plaintiffs, equal funding would not help schools. “The least promising thing we could do in education would be to spend more money on it,” he declared. The article was cited in the Texas brief before the Supreme Court.

It was possible to argue against the lawsuits based on legitimate questions about funding and outcomes, local control, or the constitutional issues at play. But at least in some cases, arguments lapsed into fatalism.

“In the view of many,” a 1971 Times story about the case claimed, “the true sources of educational deficiencies are rooted in the more basic inequalities among people and no amount of reshuffling of tax dollars, however just, is going to change that.”

“Do we as legislators have the responsibility to compensate for inadequate home life?” wondered an Oklahoma state legislator, as quoted by the Times.

It was easy to miss, but phrases like “inequalities among people,” and “inadequate home life” were suggesting that children of color or children in poverty could not be expected to achieve high levels of academic performance, and so it would be fruitless to make funding more equal.

One civil rights group was so concerned about the schools-don’t-matter narrative that it held a press conference in 1972 to beseech courts not to rely on this research. Such studies amounted to a “sophisticated type of backlash” to efforts to address inequality, said Kenneth Clark, a prominent Black psychologist whose research was cited in Brown v. Board of Education.

No matter. Attorneys defending Texas’s school funding scheme had seized on this research. “Beyond some minimum there is reason to believe that there is no relation between expenditures and quality of education,” lawyers for the state wrote in their brief before the court.

Justice Lewis Powell, whom Nixon had appointed to the Supreme Court in 1971 and who had previously served on the Richmond and Virginia school boards, wrote the majority opinion in San Antonio v. Rodriguez. It was a 5-4 ruling, with the four recent Nixon appointees forming the crucial majority bloc. If it had reached the court a bit earlier, it could have easily gone the other way.

Powell concluded it simply wasn’t the court’s role to meddle with complex funding formulas. Legally, Powell said that poor children and families do not warrant heightened constitutional protection from discrimination and that education is not a fundamental right.

Powell also raised questions about whether money matters — citing Coleman and Moynihan. “One of the major sources of controversy concerns the extent to which there is a demonstrable correlation between educational expenditures and the quality of education,” wrote Powell. The Los Angeles Times later reported that the issue of whether money mattered weighed significantly in the justices’ thinking. Powell did not himself claim that poor children of color could not learn or that schools did not matter, but the growing skepticism about education funding was deeply linked to that very idea.

The shadow of Brown v. Board of Education seemed to loom large in the case, but not in the way many expected. Enforcing desegregation had prompted a furious backlash and a host of practical difficulties that engulfed the court in litigation for decades to come. Deciding for the plaintiffs in the Rodriguez case, Powell wrote, would have led to an “unprecedented upheaval in public education.” Of course, Brown had led to such an upheaval. But Powell seemed to conclude that it simply wasn’t worth it this time.

“Powell felt that it would lead the Supreme Court into morass, like Brown v. the Board,” recalls Mark Yudof, a lawyer who worked on the case for the San Antonio parents. “It was a fear of being dragged into this unknown terrain that probably was the strongest factor.”

To Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had spearheaded the Brown litigation as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the majority opinion was a betrayal of Brown. “The majority’s holding can only be seen as a retreat from our historic commitment to equality of educational opportunity,” he wrote in dissent.

But the case was over. There would be no federal right to an education then or now. Dozens of lawsuits in lower courts were suddenly dead.

“I cannot avoid at this moment feeling deep and bitter resentment against the supreme jurists and the persons who nominated them to that high position,” Demetrio Rodriguez told the New York Times after the decision.

The legal fights over school funding were just beginning.

After the loss in 1973, lawyers and advocates shifted their focus to state courts. They sued under state constitutions — which, unlike the federal constitution, typically guarantee some form of education explicitly — and won a string of victories in a number of states. That included Texas, where Demetrio Rodriguez and other parents won a decision in 1989, which eventually resulted in some property taxes from wealthy areas being redistributed to poorer communities, a scheme dubbed by Texas politicians as “Robin Hood.”

“I cried this morning because this is something that has been in my heart,” said Rodriguez at the time. “My children will not benefit from it ... but there is nothing I can do about it now.”

Meanwhile, the debate about money and schools had also shifted. In the decades that followed Rodriguez, many politicians and researchers continued to question whether more dollars bought more learning. But this contention became much less linked to racist and classist assumptions about which children could learn. Instead it focused on whether public schools were functional enough to use money effectively.

More recently, the debate has shifted once again. In a seminal 2016 paper, three economists found that children benefited when their schools got extra money due to a state court order. Other research, examining different funding changes, has generally reached a similar conclusion: Students, particularly low-income students, typically do better when schools get more funding. “The results are very, very consistent,” said Kirabo Jackson, a Northwestern University economist and leading researcher on school funding. “The vast majority of these studies find positive effects on student outcomes.”

Research in the wake of the Coleman report has also shown that while out-of-school factors, like poverty, do affect student learning, schools and teachers matter too. Of course.

The above history might give us pause before too quickly accepting the confident claims of social science. But at the least, the new research has erased any scientific veneer behind the claim that money or schools don’t matter. Still, the court has not seriously reconsidered the Rodriguez decision; instead, in 2009, it reiterated in even stronger terms that money is unlikely to improve schools.

Admittedly, what the school funding system would have looked like today had the Supreme Court ruled differently in Rodriguez is unknowable.

Jeffrey Sutton, a federal judge and former clerk to Lewis Powell, has argued that state courts proved better equipped to deal with local funding complexities and ended up successfully addressing the funding disparities in Texas and elsewhere. These court decisions really did help chip away at school funding disparities — although it took time. By 1992, the funding gap between poor and non-poor districts was down to 20%, as states began making up for property tax differences. Presently the gap, contrary to conventional wisdom, is basically zero on a national level. Edgewood, for instance, receives similar funding as Alamo Heights all these years later.

But other legal scholars take the view that federal courts abdicated their responsibility and could be doing more. They point out that funding gaps still do exist in certain places and that there is a consensus that children in poverty need not simply equal funding for their education, but more.

In 2016, a handful of students in Detroit filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking a “right to read.” After a fleeting victory before an appeals court, the full circuit court vacated the decision. In the end, the plaintiffs managed a meager settlement with the state of Michigan in 2020. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer promised to seek $94 million in extra funding for the city’s schools, but to date, it has not been funded.

It was nearly 50 years after Rodriguez, but the decision loomed large. It also has loomed in the background of Alex Rodriguez’s life.

After the decision, his schools, not surprisingly, didn’t change much. In the years that followed, the funding gap between Edgewood and Alamo Heights actually grew larger. Rodriguez graduated from high school in 1979 with little idea of what to do next. No one at the school had suggested he go to college. He doesn’t even recall thinking that was an option. Rodriguez worked for a while at an auto parts store, and then got a job driving a city bus. He did that for 36 years, logging over 2 million miles. He retired just over a year ago.

He lives a busy, fulfilling life now — running errands for his family, working on his truck, spending time with grandkids. He lives in the same house his parents did, the one on which cameras and reporters and lawyers descended 50 years ago. He has what he needs and doesn’t want more than that. He doesn’t live with any regrets. But Alex Rodriguez also understands that he was shortchanged. “I was one of the ones that suffered through the lack of education,” he says.

Matt Barnum is a Spencer fellow in education journalism at Columbia University and a reporter at Chalkbeat, where he’s written about education policy and politics since 2017.

This story appears courtesy of Vox.com and Vox Media, LLC. Chalkbeat’s typical republishing guidelines do not apply.

Philadelphia shrugs off national controversy as it updates and reinvigorates Black history lessons

2023-02-27T19:27:42+00:00

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In 2005, Philadelphia became the first big city in America to require all students to take African American history in order to graduate. And as other states and districts pass laws and adopt policies that restrict teaching about race and racism, the city’s public schools are taking a very different approach to classroom topics now under a national microscope.

The district is redoubling its efforts to expose students to Black history and culture. This year, it debuted a substantially updated and revitalized curriculum for the course of study that relies mostly on primary and secondary sources rather than a standard textbook.

Students examine such essential questions as how Black communities retained their cultural identity in colonial America, and they compare the philosophies that motivated figures like Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey.

They also discuss whether the nation’s founders were “hypocritical for claiming freedom” while they tolerated slavery in the nation they were creating. And they are asked to ponder why the history of slavery should be taught in schools to begin with.

Philadelphia’s revisions to the course and new training for teachers track with the Board of Education’s commitment in 2021 to “address racist practices” in a multitude of areas, from discipline to the content of classroom libraries. Part of the board’s goal is to ensure that the district’s students, most of whom are Black or Latino, “see themselves in the curriculum” throughout their school careers.

The district is also incorporating instructional materials about Black history beyond the high school course. And the new materials can look quite different from things like traditional classroom textbooks.

Philadelphia’s updated high school course creates a natural avenue for students to think about and discuss topics and authors that were recently removed from early drafts of the Advanced Placement African American Studies course that the College Board has been piloting.

The controversial elimination of topics like the Black Lives Matter movement and Black feminism took place following prominent complaints from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican. The College Board has said that it did make changes to the course, but not due to political pressure.

Ismael Jimenez, the district’s social studies curriculum specialist and a driving force behind the revisions, cited the growing number of states where, as he put it, “You can’t even have these conversations” like the ones he wants to encourage.

Since early 2021, 18 states have enacted bans or restrictions on teaching topics related to race and racism, according to Education Week.

Legislators in Pennsylvania did make an effort in 2021 to restrict what could be taught about race, but their bill about the topic has failed to gain traction.

In Jimenez’s view, educators now have an even bigger obligation “to teach children the truth.”

New reading material and new training

Teachers in Philadelphia still have a Prentice-Hall textbook from 2005 for the mandatory high school course. But Jimenez said although the textbook is advanced considering when it was published, the district has also incorporated more primary sources, like Marcus Garvey’s “The Negro World.” The course relies on digital access for books like Garvey’s, which is available through the New York Public Library.

Links to sources, topics to be covered, and pacing schedules are listed for teachers in shared Google documents, which are continually updated.

When he taught the course for more than 12 years at two different high schools, “I found myself making my own materials,” Jimenez said.

Schools are also using materials that aren’t just more recent than Garvey’s work, but present history in a different way.

Earlier this month, Jimenez spoke to Philadelphia teachers and other district employees — many of whom work in elementary schools or preschools and don’t teach the mandatory high school course — at a Temple University event unveiling a new book for use in city schools called “Black Lives Always Mattered!”

The book was written and illustrated in the style of a graphic novel. It features 14 Black figures from 20th century Philadelphia history. These range from luminaries like opera singer Marian Anderson and sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, to lesser-known people like teacher and political activist Crystal Bird Fauset, photojournalist John W. Mosley, and Ruth Wright Hayre, who in the 1940s became the first Black high school teacher in the district and later rose to be Board of Education president.

The book’s lead illustrator and art coordinator is Eric Battle, who has worked for Marvel Comics and other publications. Battle said work on the book began in 2018, well before controversies about lessons on race and racism that are now making headlines.

“It came about as a way to let young people know their connections to the city, knowing why a street is named after a certain person. What did that person do to garner such an honor?” Battle said. “We want them to know that the people profiled in this book are ordinary people who did extraordinary things.”

Other changes are afoot to bolster the revised course.

While the student body in Philadelphia is mostly Black and Latino, more than two-thirds of the teachers are white. And although the mandatory course has been in city schools for 17 years, this is the first year teachers are required to attend professional development focused on the class.

Jimenez, who fought hard for the mandatory training, said it can be “problematic” if teachers “are left on their own without appropriate guidance” before presenting such important and potentially sensitive material.

Unlike in science, where teachers in Pennsylvania must be certified in the specialties of biology, physics and chemistry, social studies teachers have no such restrictions. They can be assigned to teach any required course, regardless of their expertise, even though “you have to be very knowledgeable on the subject before being able to go in and determine what should be emphasized or not,” Jimenez said.

Nicholaus Bernadini, who works at Samuel Fels High School, has been teaching African American history for 14 years and worked with Jimenez alongside other teachers to revise the mandatory high school course.

Bernadini, who is white and was born in Philadelphia, spent most of his formative years in Sea Islands, South Carolina among the Gullah people, a group of Black Americans who live along the southeastern coast and developed a distinctive culture. That background gives him a unique perspective. But Bernadini also recognizes that teachers from all walks of life can face “pitfalls” when dealing with the material.

“Teachers navigate better in environments where they can ask questions on what they are unsure about,” Bernadini said. “It is important for teachers to feel free to improve themselves as educators without backlash.”

During the professional development sessions for teachers on the course, Bernadini said there have been “incredible” conversations about everything from the role of states’ rights in the Civil War to personal perspectives on race.

“We had an educator talk about the idea that they don’t necessarily see color. We had a discussion around that along the lines of, ‘We can respect that, but what’s the impact of that mindset on you and your students?’” Bernadini said. “And while not all white teachers think that, there are teachers of color who don’t necessarily disagree. So having these conversations gets teachers to feel more comfortable about teaching the content.”

Jimenez said that teachers have told him that they appreciated the professional development sessions on a personal level.

“They realize that a lot of things they emphasized before were problematic and that it’s a reflection of the indoctrination in what society tells us about racial progress,” he said.

Teachers see broad benefits of learning Black history

Teachers at different levels of the school system say how invaluable it is for students to encounter things in their classes that presents them a fuller picture of American history through the lives of Black people. And they’re puzzled if not angered by those who say otherwise.

Tiffany Johnson teaches fourth grade at Ziegler Elementary School. Her students are learning about topics ranging from Black women’s contributions to society to the Green Book, a 20th century guide for Black travelers to the places they would be welcome to stay and to have a meal, where they could get their hair done, and which gas stations to patronize.

Many of her students previously had no idea about the existence of things like the Green Book in American history, she said.

“I don’t see what’s wrong with teaching the truth of what happened. I don’t get that. It’s not like we’re saying white people are bad,” said Johnson, who is Black. “We’re saying these events happened, this is how people reacted. The facts need to be told. It happened. We can’t sugarcoat it.”

Monique McKenney, now at Central High School, has taught African American history for most of her 24 years in Philadelphia schools. She said she is “not shocked, but disappointed and outraged” that politicians like DeSantis “would try to water down, or whitewash a curriculum that all students would benefit from.”

Central, one of the city’s leading academic magnet schools, is racially and ethnically diverse but it is predominantly white and Asian, unlike the district as a whole. In McKenney’s experiences, a broad cross-section of students have benefited from the lessons she teaches about the topic.

“It’s interesting to see students of various backgrounds who are able to connect with some of the experiences that you have in African American history,” said McKenney, who is also Black.

Some students, she said, “are surprised they’ve never heard about certain things before.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Tyre Nichols’ death in Memphis creates another tragic teaching moment for Facing History & Ourselves

2023-02-10T18:15:08+00:00

The nonprofit group Facing History & Ourselves, which operates in more than 100 countries, provides educators with curriculum and resources to help students understand the lessons of history to combat bigotry and hate. It has operated in Memphis since 1992, and has reached more than 121,000 students in that time.

It also guides educators in using current events to spawn thoughtful discussions, help students think critically about difficult issues, and understand that they have agency in shaping those issues.

One of the current events students are discussing is the death of Tyre Nichols. The 29-year-old skateboarder, photographer and FedEx worker died days after being brutalized by Memphis police officers during a traffic stop on Jan. 7. Five officers have been charged in his slaying, which sparked protests throughout the city and nation.

Michele Philips is executive director of Facing History & Ourselves’ Southeast region, and is based in Memphis. Philips spoke with Chalkbeat about the role Facing History & Ourselves instructors will play in helping Memphis students grapple with Nichols’ death.

The interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

How is Facing History & Ourselves taught in Shelby County schools?

Facing History & Ourselves is in 80% of the middle and high schools, and grades 6 to 12. It looks different in each school. We have a Facing History & Ourselves elective, in which students can get a semester credit for social studies. About 30 schools have that course. Then we have a lot of teachers in English and Language Arts to teach “To Kill A Mockingbird,” but use it to teach the history of lynching and mob mentality, as opposed to just the coming-of-age of Scout.

Again, the purpose of Facing History & Ourselves is to use the lessons of history to confront bigotry and hate. We feel like that’s more important than ever now, and we’re sticking to our script.

I noticed on your website that you have a mini-lesson on the long, troubled history of law enforcement and Black people. One of the essential questions it presents is the challenge of teaching that history without stereotyping law enforcement. How does Tyre Nichols’ death complicate that?

It can complicate it, but we try to help students see each other’s total humanity. We help them recognize they can be agents of change through seeing each other’s humanity. I keep thinking about how our students today are going to be the community leaders, are going to be the police officers, the professionals, the decision makers of tomorrow. The practice of seeing each other’s total humanity starts with our students.

How would your instructors talk to students who are disillusioned and upset after seeing the Nichols video?

We don’t talk to them. We listen to them. We really let them sit with that, because the last thing we want to do is minimize their pain. Our teachers are really skilled at listening, and letting the students talk. We don’t want to say that it’ll be all right, because it may not be all right. I think our teachers have done that, not pushing a student who is angry or sad to talk about it, because they may not be ready to talk about it.

As you know, back in 2021 the Tennessee legislature passed a law restricting how lessons on race are taught. How is this affecting your instructors — especially when students are bound to have questions about race and police brutality in the wake of Nichols’ death?

I knew you were going to ask that. As you know, learning history is nuanced and complex, but it’s well within the ability of our students to understand with guidance from caring educators who are coached and trained on how to teach with empathy and accuracy.

That’s what we do. We have always been committed to teaching history with all of its honesty. The first thing that you do in a Facing History class is to teach the teachers how to build a safe and reflective classroom, so that the students get to learn each others’ stories, so that when you have a difficult conversation, we’re much more capable of being able to understand and hear each other.

What they teach is within the state standards of Tennessee. But I’m not going to tell you that it hasn’t had a chilling effect on some of our teachers. Some have been anxious and nervous. I’m not going to sugarcoat that.

How are your instructors working to tamp down that chilling effect, especially in this moment we’re in?

I think that our teachers are committed to slowing down and talking about (Nichols’ death) in a process that really humanizes the students, so they can reflect and have conversations. So far, we haven’t had a pushback.

There are ways to do this. Let me give you an example. In August, when we had the situation with the shooter (19-year-old Ezekiel Kelly was charged with killing three people in a citywide shooting spree), I went to Central High School and listened to Mary McIntosh’s Facing History & Ourselves class, and sat there and listened to her unpack the fear those kids had around that shooting that happened in August. She slowed it down, and got them to free-write it in a journal, just dump it all out, and gave them agency to be able to talk to each other.

Again, if you start with building that safe and reflective classroom, where every voice matters, that helps.

A 2021 study published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that inner-city high school students in Los Angeles who were exposed to high levels of police violence were more prone to struggle academically in school, or to drop out. Do those findings surprise you?

Unfortunately, no. I think the trauma that is happening to our young people, even seeing it over and over again, is trauma. We frequently work with our instructors on building a culture of care, because (violence) does have a ripple effect of them doing worse in school.

Looking at the historical case studies of policing in this country is also helpful, because then you can see the legacies of where this comes from, and also see what we need to do. And what I keep coming back to is what we need to do will come from these students, because they’re going to be the future leaders.

One of the students I spoke with regarding Tyre Nichols’ death told me he was becoming desensitized to police brutality and that he almost sees it as inevitable. What can your instructors do to help youths understand that this doesn’t have to be the case?

I’m glad you asked that, because we don’t believe that history has to be inevitable, and that we’re doomed to repeat it. We believe history is made by human beings, and we don’t have to repeat that. Our slogan is “People Make Choices and Choices Make History,” and if we can get our students to see each others’ humanity, we don’t have to repeat that.

Bureau Chief Tonyaa Weathersbee oversees Chalkbeat Tennessee’s education coverage. Contact her at tweathersbee@chalkbeat.org.

My passion for education equity is informed by my past — and our future

2023-01-25T23:22:09+00:00

Tonyaa Weathersbee’s first-grade photo, 1965-66. She was a child of Jacksonville educators during the early days of desegregation, and her passion for education equity was nurtured early on.

For my first day of school in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1965, my mother dressed me in an orange-and-white gingham dress that she made, tied white ribbons on my two smallish pigtails, and gave me a quarter and three pennies to buy the hot lunch that remains my favorite comfort food: Baked spaghetti, English peas, a roll, and a square of yellow cake with chocolate frosting.

Turns out it was a halcyon beginning that briefly insulated me from the harsh realities that raged around me.

One of those realities was starting school in the Duval County School System, which was so grossly underfunded that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools had disaccredited its high schools the year before.

Another was being a Black student in that system, one that ignored a desegregation order issued in 1960, six years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education that declared segregated schools unconstitutional.

Black students in this system had to navigate puddles and other assorted ickiness to reach classrooms in schools plagued with drainage problems, overcrowding, and other issues that turned learning into an ordeal when it should have been an adventure.

Schools were so crowded that, as a Black former Jacksonville elementary school teacher described it in a 2021 report on inequities in the school system, “Our third graders were going across the street to the little church that was across the street from the school, and then our fifth and sixth graders had to go down behind the school across the creek, to another church.”

“Our (Black) schools were allowed to get in disrepair,” the teacher recalled.

The learning conditions were so horrendous that in 1964, 27,000 Black students, under the leadership of the NAACP, boycotted the schools over two days.

My parents, who were both teachers in that system, tried to make my everyday education experience as fulfilling as that segregated system would allow. But they understood that if it persisted, I wouldn’t be prepared for a future outside of it.

Tonyaa’s father, William Weathersbee, and a classmate, William Cherry, at William Raines High School in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1976. Her father was a football coach and dean of boys at the school.

That is why they walked out in 1968 to protest the state’s refusal to adequately fund schools, a statewide walkout that served as a prelude to wider tensions that erupted later that year, when assassins killed Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

It would be another three years before Duval County finally yielded to the accreditors and the courts.

The last high school was reaccredited in 1971 and desegregation — largely through court-ordered busing — began that year. It was then that many of the glaring inequalities, like hand-me-down books and desks, began to ebb. The dilapidated Black schools were either closed or converted to other uses.

Yet decades later, in Jacksonville and in school systems throughout the nation, the battle for education equity still rages.

It is that history and lived experience that informs my work here at Chalkbeat Tennessee.

Tonyaa’s mother, Wallace Weathersbee, in her classroom at West Jacksonville Sixth Grade Center sometime in the late 1970s, early 1980s.

I fondly remember my first day of school because for me, that reflects how education should begin — as a journey of dignity and possibilities for children; as something to be experienced and not endured.

It should also be an experience in which resources are available to students regardless of where they live, or what color or ethnicity they are, or how much their parents earn.

But for far too many students in Tennessee and elsewhere, that’s not the case.

Public school students continue to be isolated by race and class. And today, as Black and Latino youths make up an increasing share of students in public schools, the stakes of failing to recognize the significance of this moment couldn’t be higher.

According to a 2020 report by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, Black students now make up around 15% of students in public schools, while Latino students, who are the fastest growing segment of public school students, make up 27%. Asian students make up nearly 6%.

White students now make up 47% of students in public schools, down from 79% in 1970. That decline isn’t because more white students are going to private schools or being homeschooled, but because fewer white children are being born, according to the report.

“In a multiracial society where there is no racial majority, skills in working and living successfully in multiracial institutions are a vital asset,” the report concludes.

“These skills are learned, mostly through experience, and are extremely difficult to acquire living in segregated communities and attending segregated, concentrated-poverty schools.”

So while the quest for education equity when I was a child was driven by the civil rights movement and fears of more social unrest, what must motivate it now is the reality that the workforce of the future will rely heavily on people who aren’t white.

What that means is that education equity isn’t just about ensuring a future of opportunity for children who will constitute a majority of the nation, or simply about doing what’s morally right and fair.

It’s about the future of a nation that will need educated workers to fill jobs that people like myself — children of the 1960s and 1970s — now hold.

But if thousands of students are left to struggle in schools that have become more racially and economically isolated since my childhood, or in school systems that are horribly underfunded, as Jacksonville’s schools were when I entered first grade, then we’re not just failing them.

We’re failing the future.

It’s fortuitous that someone like me wound up living and working in the city where Dr. King spent his last days helping its sanitation workers fight for equity and dignity.

Fortuitous that I — a Black woman whose mother taught fifth and sixth grades and whose father was a high school dean and coach who admired Dr. King so much that he made me memorize “I Have A Dream” when I was 8 — am here working in a space designed to continue that equity work.

Fortuitous that my journalism journey took me from the 904 — Jacksonville’s area code — to the 901 — Memphis’ area code.

But being at Chalkbeat is an opportunity for me to turn that serendipity into action by guiding education coverage that centers on what King, my parents and others fought for: educational equity and opportunity for all children.

Especially those who look like the future.

Tonyaa Weathersbee is a multiple award-winning journalist, proud University of Florida Gator and Jacksonville Raines High Viking. She joined Chalkbeat Tennessee as its bureau chief last August after a 26-year career as a columnist at The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, Florida, and at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. Contact her at tweathersbee@chalkbeat.org.

Preschool suspensions are harmful — and surprisingly common

2023-01-18T19:22:30+00:00

I am a Black woman, a mother of two, a former preschool and special education teacher, and a doctoral student in early childhood education. Although my kids are no longer in preschool, I think back on the experience in their early childhood program with mixed emotions.

My older son was quiet and learned easily the expectations of being in school, while his younger brother did not. Our preschool often expressed how much they loved our family, but comments shared during a period when my younger son struggled revealed a different story. “He just needs more time” — that was the conclusion that my spouse and I arrived at and the message that we communicated with the directors. Unfortunately, they did not share that view.

Tara Kirton

That meant each day was filled with anxiety as I wondered what I might hear about my son from the staff during pick-up or drop-off. I feared what they might suggest or do to reduce the behavior that they found concerning.

The situation was not healthy or sustainable for our family, so we began seeking alternative programs where our son might feel more at ease and where the staff would see his child-like behavior, such as biting and crying, as precisely that, the behavior of a child not yet 3.

Around the same time, our preschool approached us to have him evaluated for special education services. I worried about our son becoming another statistic about a Black boy who “needed” special education when he really needed patience, understanding, and affirmations from the staff. Black children have long been disproportionally represented among special education students and under-referred for gifted programs. But we went ahead with the evaluation, hopeful that we might actually be able to figure out if targeted supports could help him feel more successful.

At the time, I was a graduate student in early childhood and special education, so I knew all too well how Black children and children receiving special education services can be mistreated in schools — including preschools — and how, for example, they face a disproportionate number of suspensions and expulsions, even in early childhood.

I feared what they might suggest or do to reduce the behavior that they found concerning.

Research shows that Black preschoolers, just 18% of enrollment, account for nearly half of all preschool suspensions. And those suspensions, even expulsions, aren’t as rare as you might think.

The National Survey of Children’s Health found that 250 U.S. students a day are suspended or expelled from their preschools. In fact, preschoolers are expelled three times more often than their K-12 counterparts, and Black, Indigenous, and multiracial preschoolers receive a disproportionately high number of suspensions, according to federal data.

Preschool often represents a child’s first educational experience and can set the tone for how children and families interact with educators for years to come. For many young children, it is also the first time they are away from a family member or loved one for an extended period. This experience comes with new expectations to complete with some independence tasks such as toileting, cleaning up after themselves, and self-regulating when they become upset. That’s a lot to ask when you consider how at the age of 3 or 4, a preschooler has only been out in the world for roughly 36 to 59 months.

Things become even more complicated when you consider cultural differences between the family and staff, language delays and other developmental variations, the needs of a child who is an emergent bilingual, and the different expectations at home and school.

Zero-tolerance policies are not interventions; they simply remove children from the learning environment, which doesn’t set them up for success upon their return. Thankfully, some states, such as California, have moved to ban preschool suspensions and expulsions.

Early childhood programs must live up to the promises they make to families to provide a safe and nurturing environment for every child to learn, grow, experience joy, and see themselves reflected in the curriculum. That promise will not be fulfilled if children can be suspended and expelled for “behavioral issues,” both real and imagined, due to ignorance about the practices of various cultures and an inability to recognize how biases impact young children.

As kindergarten approached and my family transitioned out of the preschool, we received an apology from a staff member who admitted they might have rushed to judgment about our son and the best way to support him at the time. While I am grateful that our family’s experience resolved itself respectfully and that our son was able to make friends, learn, and enjoy being a part of the classroom community with the right supports, I sometimes wonder how things might have been different if the program had shown a bit more patience and understanding.

Our younger son is now finishing middle school, and he is thriving in all areas, thankfully. He has always been a curious child, and we are glad to see that hasn’t changed. He no longer receives special education services; those ended right around the time he finished preschool. Our son loves reading, math, and science and knows a lot about many things, such as basketball and geography.

Most days, I can think of the challenging times and the happy times when I reflect on our son’s preschool years. Cognitively, I knew how helpful special education services could be. Still, emotionally, it was a different story and one that was filled with questions about the role of identity in how our son was being treated and why he was being referred.

Families deserve respect, care, and support when working with their preschools to make a decision that is best for their child and family — not one based on biases or a desire for a temporary solution in the form of a suspension or expulsion.

Tara Kirton is a doctoral student in early childhood education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Kirton has held numerous roles in education at the early childhood level and in postsecondary education, including preschool teacher, special education itinerant teacher, and adjunct instructor and fieldwork advisor for undergraduate and graduate students.

Bill would curb ‘implicit bias’ training in Tennessee schools, universities

2023-01-12T23:16:20+00:00

Tennessee public schools and universities would not be allowed to require employees to take “implicit bias” training under legislation filed this week by two state lawmakers.

The legislation also would apply to employees of Tennessee’s education department and state Board of Education.

Currently, it’s up to local school districts, charter schools, and the state to set personnel policies that may or may not include implicit bias training for their employees. Such training is designed to increase self-awareness around subconscious prejudices and stereotypes that may affect how individuals see and treat people of another race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background.

A significant amount of research in education says that such biases may contribute to racial disparities, such as differences in student achievement, learning opportunities, and school discipline between Black and white students. But it’s less clear whether training about implicit bias actually changes behaviors.

The Tennessee bill comes about two years after the state became one of the nation’s first to enact a law limiting how race and gender can be discussed in the classroom, including conversations about systemic racism. Last year, the GOP-controlled legislature passed another law that could lead to a statewide ban of certain school library books, some of which deal with matters of race and gender.

State Sen. Todd Gardenhire of Chattanooga, who is co-sponsoring the bill with fellow Republican Rep. Jason Zachary of Knoxville, said the measure is needed to protect school employees from policies that could lead to disciplinary action or firing. He cited the case of a Texas nurse who said she was fired by a hospital last year for refusing to take a mandatory course that she said was “grounded in the idea that I’m racist because I’m white.”

Sen. Todd Gardenhire is a Republican from Chattanooga.

“It’s about having to admit to something that you’re not,” Gardenhire told Chalkbeat on Thursday.

Gardenhire, who is white, noted that his legislation would prohibit “adverse licensure and employment actions” in schools or education-related agencies if an employee refuses to participate in such training.

Senate Minority Leader Raumesh Akbari, a Memphis Democrat who is Black, called the proposal “a step in the wrong direction.”

She cast the legislation as a continuation of politically motivated national conversations that seek to pit people against each other instead of fostering policies that promote understanding, respect, and reconciliation among people of different races and backgrounds.

“That is a bill that I think is damaging to children,” Akbari said. “At the end of the day, we want to make sure that they have the safest, most equitable and fairest opportunity when they go to school.”

Implicit bias can hurt people of certain races and backgrounds in their interactions with numerous institutions — from law enforcement and criminal justice to health care and education.

In Tennessee, students of color make up about 40% of the state’s public school population, while teachers of color make up about 13% of its educators.

Mark Chin, a Vanderbilt University assistant professor who studies racial bias in education, said his research published in 2020 suggests a need to address bias in the classroom.

Using national data, he and his colleagues found larger disparities in test achievement and suspension rates between Black and white youth in counties where teachers hold stronger pro-white/anti-Black biases.

But implicit bias training is not enough to significantly change outcomes, Chin said.

“A single session where people are told of implicit biases is less impactful than sustained, embedded conversations around implicit bias,” he said.

It’s unclear whether or how many school districts or charter schools across Tennessee have policies that require employees to participate in implicit bias training.

Elizabeth Tullos, a spokeswoman for the State Board of Education, said Tennessee does not require such training within its agencies. However, staff members for the board, which sets rules and policies around education, go through the state’s required annual training on workplace discrimination, she said.

Brian Blackley, a spokesman for the state education department, said his agency doesn’t require its employees to participate in implicit bias training either and has not taken a position on the legislation.

The bill defines implicit bias training as any program that presumes an individual is “unconsciously, subconsciously, or unintentionally” predisposed to “be unfairly prejudiced in favor of or against a thing, person, or group to adjust the individual’s patterns of thinking in order to eliminate the individual’s unconscious bias or prejudice.”

You can track the legislation on the General Assembly website.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee textbook panel says it’s ill-equipped to manage library book appeals

2022-12-16T11:00:00+00:00

Tennessee’s textbook commission has wide new powers to determine which books students can and can’t access in public school libraries. But members say the panel doesn’t have enough resources to finish its most pressing new task: providing guidance to school leaders on how to comply with several recently enacted library laws.

The all-volunteer commission blew past a statutory Dec. 1 deadline to finalize its guidelines, and decided last week that it can’t do so without first getting legal advice.

“We have gotten zero guidance from any attorneys — zero. And we’re just out here as volunteers doing this,” said commission member John Combs, a school superintendent from Tipton County.

The new laws require schools to periodically screen their library materials for “age appropriateness,” based on local standards and community input. They also empowered the 13-member Tennessee Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission to rule on appeals to local decisions about individual books — and to even ban challenged books statewide — a significant expansion of the commission’s original mandate.

With the commission’s final vote on guidance likely weeks or even months away, school administrators are on their own for now to figure out how to navigate changes in the law.

This month’s missed deadline, though, is a symptom of a larger concern that commission members are grappling with as they prepare for a potential onslaught of appeals of book challenges in a state that’s one of the nation’s leaders in banning literary, scholarly, and creative works.

When GOP lawmakers passed the library appeals law in the waning hours of the legislative session this spring, they provided no funding for the commission to hire staff to manage its new appeals work. The law’s fiscal impact was identified as “not significant,” according to an analysis by legislative staff.

But essentially, it was an unfunded mandate.

Established in 1983, the textbook commission has no offices, no full-time staff, and no independent lawyers with whom to confer. Most members have full-time jobs and lean on administrative support from the state education department to fulfill the body’s core responsibility of approving textbooks and instructional materials, and establishing contracts with publishers to guarantee availability to schools at the lowest price.

In its new appellate role over school libraries, the panel will have to dive into local disputes over age-appropriateness and community standards. That means setting up processes to make sure complainants are eligible to appeal, reviewing all documentation leading up to the local decision, and analyzing the materials in question, possibly with statewide consequences.

“It’s a lot of work to be added to people who already have a full load,” commission Chair Linda Cash told a legislative subcommittee in September.

Linda Cash, flanked by commissioners Lee Houston and John Combs, chairs the Tennessee Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission.

Cash, who is school superintendent in Bradley County near Chattanooga, has asked Gov. Bill Lee’s administration for recurring funding to hire staff and set up offices similar to several other education agencies. For instance, the 2-year-old Public Charter School Commission, which Lee championed, has a 14-member staff to help its nine appointed members manage charter school appeals. The State Board of Education has 15 employees who help its 11 appointees set policies ranging from academic standards to teacher preparation and licensing requirements.

In a Nov. 22 letter obtained by Chalkbeat, Cash told Tennessee Finance Commissioner Jim Bryson “it is imperative” that the commission hire an executive director, an attorney, and administrative support to help it carry out both its old and new responsibilities. And during last week’s commission meeting, she also cited the need for a policy adviser and additional support from the state education department.

“Our goal … is to follow the legislative intent and to provide guidance on this law on the age-appropriate materials in school libraries,” she told fellow commissioners. “Limited staffing often makes our task more difficult.”

Rep. John Ragan, who co-chairs the legislative committee overseeing government operations, has endorsed Cash’s request. He called the panel’s newest charge from the legislature “yeoman’s work.”

“If they need additional support, let’s make sure we try to get it for them,” the Oak Ridge Republican told representatives of the state education department in September.

But state Rep. John Ray Clemmons, a Nashville Democrat who spoke against the school library bill on the House floor, questions the need to add another bureaucratic layer and notes that the legislation came from the political party that claims it’s for less government and more local control.

“The core function of the law is to pull books off of bookshelves, and now we’re faced with implementing this bad and dangerous education policy,” Clemmons told Chalkbeat. “Tennessee taxpayers are going to be on the hook for the whole thing.”

Number of expected appeals remains uncertain

As commissioners seek to staff up, the big unknown is the workload they’ll face under Tennessee’s new school library laws, which were enacted at the urging of Lee and House Speaker Cameron Sexton following several high-profile challenges over books and curriculum in 2021.

Katie Capshaw, president of the Tennessee Association of School Librarians, says it’s “very rare” for school librarians to receive complaints about items in their collections in the first place.

And Cash has been optimistic that local attention and diligence in addressing complaints will make appeals unnecessary.

But Commissioner Laurie Cardoza-Moore, whom Sexton appointed from Williamson County to represent parents and who has allies in the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty, has said the panel should prepare for a wave of appeals once it formally establishes its appellate process next year.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore, a member of the state textbook commission, speaks to members of a Moms for Liberty chapter in Franklin, Tennessee, on Jan. 11, 2022.

“I just received a packet that I shared with all of you this morning,” she told fellow commissioners last month, “and there are numerous items that are being challenged.”

According to PEN America, a group that advocates for free expression in literature, Tennessee trails only Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania in logging the most restrictions or attempted restrictions on books. Most of the objections have to do with sexuality, LGBTQ themes, and issues related to race and racism.

In the last month, school leaders in at least two Tennessee districts have addressed book complaints with different outcomes.

Wilson County Schools, east of Nashville, pulled two books that its board deemed sexually graphic — “Tricks” and “Jack of Hearts” — from high school libraries.

Sumner County Schools, north of Nashville, voted to keep “A Place Inside of Me” on its shelves. The book includes a poem and illustrations showing a Black child dealing with his emotions after a police shooting.

Nationwide, the number of attempts to ban or restrict library resources in schools, universities and public libraries in 2022 is on track to exceed record counts from 2021, according to preliminary data released in September by the American Library Association.

Commissioners may not have to read an entire book

Tennessee’s textbook commission has been drafting broad guidance for school districts on how to comply with the laws. Much of its draft is based on model guidance developed by the Tennessee School Boards Association and already used by many school boards and charter school governing bodies across the state.

During last week’s two-hour virtual meeting, commissioners nailed down a timetable that would require complainants to file their request for appeal within five school days of a local decision. The originating district or charter school would then have up to 20 school days to submit documentation of deliberations and decisions. And the appeal would be heard at the next regularly scheduled meeting of the commission, which meets twice a year.

Members of Tennessee’s textbook commission prepare to convene in Nashville on Nov. 18, 2022.

Among the panel’s considerations would be whether the material is suitable and consistent with the school’s educational mission; appropriate for the age and maturity levels of the students who may access it; containing literary, historical, and/or artistic value and merit; and offering a variety of viewpoints.

A student, parent, guardian, or school employee would be able to file only two appeals in a single year. And appeals couldn’t be filed on a book that the commission has already ruled on until after three years, which would be timed to the appointment of new commission members.

But commissioners wouldn’t necessarily have to read an appealed book in its entirety before voting — unless they want to.

Commissioner Lee Houston, a school librarian in Cumberland County, sought to include that requirement because “context is important,” she said. But her motion failed for lack of a second after Commissioner Billy Bryan said a simple review should be sufficient, without reading the entire book.

“We don’t know how many appeals we’re going to get and how many books we’re going to be required to read,” Bryan said. “And there’s a limited amount of time on my already busy schedule for reading who-knows-how-many library books.”

Tennessee school leaders await final guidance

Since the commission has no staff attorney of its own, members voted to seek legal counsel from the state attorney general on its draft guidance, but to go to lawyers for the legislature or education department if necessary.

In the meantime, school leaders are relying on their own processes for reviewing challenged books and materials.

“I believe we’re in compliance with these new laws, but it would be affirming if the commission could reinforce what we’re already doing,” said Danny Weeks, director of Dickson County Schools, west of Nashville, where the school board has voted on two book challenges in 10 years.

“State guidance,” he added, “would be nice to have.”

Marta W. Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

How I found my voice as a Black student at Brooklyn Tech

2022-12-15T13:00:00+00:00

I was excitedly talking with my friends about our high school plans when one of my eighth grade teachers stopped me in the hallway and asked which school I got into.

“Brooklyn Tech,” I said with a smile, thinking of the months I spent studying for the specialized high school exam, or SHSAT.

“Oh, good,” she said. “You know they only accepted seven Black students at Stuyvesant this year? It’s sad.”

Etana Williams

I wasn’t sure what to say. I knew that specialized New York City high schools like Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech enrolled a small percentage of Black students. In 2019, the year I was accepted, merely 5.7% of students at Tech were Black; that’s 341 Black students out of a total enrollment of 5,940. When I was first admitted, those demographics didn’t bother me.

Black students were underrepresented at my elementary and middle school, and I still felt comfortable in those spaces. I was younger, and my idea of “inclusivity” was whether my schoolmates would let me play tag with them or share their snacks with me.

But that fall, after the first-day excitement wore off, I began noticing certain patterns. Like how I was one of, at most, three Black faces in my classes. And how none of my teachers looked like me.

History lessons about slavery became uncomfortable as I noticed eyes quickly shifting towards me, and then away when I met them. Stereotypical comments coming from other students about how “Asians are smart” and “work harder” due to strict parents and cultural upbringings made me wonder what other stereotypes they believed were true.

Regularly hearing slurs coming from the mouths of my peers and snickering at racially charged jokes that shouldn’t have been made — it agitated me. I tried expressing this frustration to one of my non-Black friends in hopes of getting an ounce of understanding or acknowledgment of my situation.

Instead, I heard, “It was just a joke, they didn’t mean it. You’re overreacting.”

I didn’t stand up for myself, and I didn’t have a space to share my feelings of isolation and powerlessness. In previous years, I didn’t mind the lack of diversity in my friend groups. Now it bothered me that I only had one Black friend at the start of my freshman year.

Then at a club fair a few weeks into the school year, I saw a table where a group of Black students was socializing. I made eye contact with one of the girls there. She smiled as she approached me and asked if I would like to put my email down to join Brooklyn Tech’s Black Student Union. Before then, I had no idea that this club existed. I enthusiastically agreed.

The following Monday, I walked into my first Black Student Union meeting. I remember seeing a sea of Black faces and wondering how there could be so many of us here when I barely saw enough on a daily basis to count on one hand. I took a seat and looked around, excitedly.

“We know how small the Black population is here at Tech, so we wanted to have a space where we could all come together,” said one of the group’s leaders. “We want to create a family.”

That day, we played games, listened to music, shared food, and talked about our experiences at Tech. I found myself nodding a lot in agreement and laughing at everyone’s jokes.

Mondays at the Black Student Union became an anchor of my time at Tech. It was where I could have in-depth, honest conversations with peers. We processed George Floyd’s death and Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal. We talked about our experiences in and out of school, and shared our sadness, pain, anger, and also joy.

Junior year, I tried out for (and made) the step team. It was a majority Black space; and I soon realized that the Black Student Union wasn’t the only place I could feel comfortable and accepted.

I was spending most days after school in spaces surrounded by people who looked like me. I got to know the Black students I had seen in the hallways and in my classes. The microaggressions and uncomfortable stares didn’t stop, but the way I approached them did. Rather than staying quiet, I responded:

Why do you think that’s OK for you to say?

That’s not funny.

Your words have an impact, you should choose them more wisely.

Pointing out ignorance still wasn’t easy, but I knew I had a network of Black friends and Black teachers that I met through my clubs to confide in. I not only wanted to defend myself but also all of the Black students at Tech who’ve experienced the same things but didn’t know how to respond. Letting these comments slide was a form of compliance that I was no longer willing to accept.

It shouldn’t have been so difficult to feel welcomed in my own school. Something is wrong when students feel alienated in the space where they spend the majority of their time. My experience is part of a bigger problem. Black students remain vastly underrepresented at New York’s elite specialized high schools.

This doesn’t mean that Black students should avoid applying to these schools. Just the opposite. Simply enrolling as a student of color creates more inclusive spaces for future students. While it hasn’t been easy being one of a few Black students at my school, finding accepting communities has made the experience worthwhile.

Etana Williams is a 17-year-old African-Caribbean student living in Brooklyn. She is a senior at Brooklyn Technical High School, and she enjoys crocheting, reading, and writing in her free time.

‘I want Black students to feel valued’: Newark Global Studies students describe pattern of racism

2022-12-15T11:00:00+00:00

When Brenda Brown read what the Newark School of Global Studies had to offer, she knew her son had to go.

Brown’s son, Terril Coley, was excited about being immersed in a high school that offered a global perspective, where he could study different cultures and prepare to study abroad in Taiwan or the Middle East. It seemed like a good deal for a young Black man from Newark, but three years after starting at Global Studies, Coley is about to transfer out after enduring racism and harassment from his peers.

During last month’s board of education meeting, Coley spoke out about the ongoing harassment and described being bullied in front of his teacher and classmates because of the color of his skin.

“I was called a ‘smart chimpanzee’ in my English class,” said Coley to district leaders during the board meeting.

Interviews with students, parents, and teachers reveal a pattern of racist harassment at Global Studies against Black students, who are the minority at the school where Hispanic students make up 70% of the student body, according to state enrollment data from last fall.

Black students and parents at the school have complained to school and district leaders but describe an administration that isn’t taking the situation seriously enough. They have also said there are delays in reporting incidents to parents and lax enforcement of disciplinary action against offending students, forcing some parents such as Brown to transfer their children out of the school. Community leaders say leaving these issues unattended could lead to further strife between the groups of students.

The ongoing harassment prompted one student to start the Black Student Union and rally his peers to speak out at the November school board meeting.

Black Student Union members and their parents are calling for a leadership change at the school, specifically a replacement for principal Nelson Ruiz, and stronger policies to prevent and discipline students who engage in racism.

The district’s student discipline policy, which was revised in July 2022, notes that “the school district will not tolerate acts of harassment, intimidation or bullying.”

District spokesperson Nancy Deering, Global Studies Principal Nelson Ruiz, and Vice Principal Hoda Abdelwahab did not respond to requests for comment.

Global Studies first opened its doors in 2020 welcoming 114 ninth graders to the high school where they study diplomacy, learn Arabic, or take courses in economics while gaining fluency in Chinese culture and language. Of those students, more than half identified as Hispanic, while 31% identified as Black at the time. Last school year, the number of Black students dropped to 26% while Hispanic students rose to 70%, according to state enrollment data from last fall.

Enrollment data for this school year is not available, but Black students say representation on campus has declined due to “consistent instances” of racism against them, according to David Allen, a junior at the high school who founded the school’s Black Student Union at the end of last year.

Allen, who is also student body president, said he started the club to give Black students a safe space on campus. The fact that the club wasn’t created when the school opened is “telling of the culture” within the school, he said.

“The issues that happened last year were a lot more verbally violent,” Allen told Chalkbeat Newark while describing the threats and racial slurs he’s heard from his peers over the years. “But it’s also been a little ostracizing because, obviously, people know that the few Black students are the ones that are reporting the racism.”

The incident targeting Coley this October sparked outrage with his peers and mother, who said it took days until the school told her what had happened even after the teacher who witnessed the incident filed a report with administrators. It took nearly three weeks until administrators met with Brown on Nov. 3 and took action, which ultimately resulted in the suspension of one student, Brown said.

The frustration felt by Black students reached a tipping point at the end of last school year when Allen’s best friend, a Black and Muslim student, was called a racial slur used against Black people and a terrorist as they were walking down the hallway. The student who insulted Allen’s best friend was previously suspended for two days for using similar language against another student, Allen said.

“He still says the same things, so obviously, the disciplinary action wasn’t severe enough,” Allen said of the student who said the slurs. “People need to be disciplined for these things. Like, it’s not just words, these kinds of things can lead to violence on both parts.”

D’Renna Johnson is the director of the Newark Community Street Team’s Safe Passage program, which helps students get to and from school safely. Johnson said it’s important for schools to cultivate a space of trust so students feel comfortable reporting instances of bullying or harassment.

The Street Team, a community-based organization that works on violence reduction strategies, also monitors conflicts between students and works to intervene in instances of harassment, intimidation, and bullying before they lead to violence.

“As an adult, our responsibility is to try to get in front of that situation,” Johnson said.

In the past, the Street Team has dealt with racial conflicts among high schoolers and has heard of students calling on “older brothers and sisters to handle things in a dangerous way” or other adults who may resort to violence to settle issues, Johnson said. The Street Team resolves issues by bringing students together to talk about their differences before conflict can turn into physical confrontation, Johnson said.

“Let’s come to a medium where we could coexist together in this city and know that we’re not going to cause each other any harm,” Johnson added.

Allen’s best friend is the daughter of Newark’s board of education president Dawn Haynes and no longer attends the high school due to the ongoing racism she experienced at the school, Haynes said. Her daughter, a “super honor roll” student and the former student body secretary, did not feel comfortable continuing her education at the school, Haynes said.

“If a child’s school is not welcoming, how are they going to learn?” said Haynes to Chalkbeat Newark.

Administrators slow to address complaints about racism

Before the incident with his best friend, Allen recalled, a group of students made racist jokes about blackface and Black stereotypes in his history class last year.

The district’s Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying policy require the high school’s two anti-bullying specialists to investigate “any gesture, written, verbal or physical act, or any electronic communication, whether it is single incident or series of incidents,” reported to administrators, especially if the incident “is perceived as being motivated by race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, gender, sexual orientation,” among other characteristics.

Prior to the incident with his best friend in June, Allen and four of his friends compiled audio recordings of students using racial slurs during class and made a list of instances when Black students faced harassment and reported it to the school’s vice principal, Hoda Abdelwahab, last November. She promised she would investigate the situation, Allen said.

After turning in their compilations to administration last fall, Allen said the harassment continued from the same group of students. According to Allen, he and his best friend met with administration in June to report the racial slurs said in the hallway. That’s when they found out it was the first time administrators were hearing about the racism they were experiencing, Allen added.

“We found out that she never shared any of what we shared with her with the rest of the administration,” Allen said. “So, this is kind of a pattern with them. They’ll pretend they’re going to do something, and then kind of just sweep it under the rug and pray for the best and hope it just goes away.”

Allen was part of the group that attended the November board of education meeting and, like Coley, he told board members how he and his friends have been called “the n-word, a monkey, a slave, a caricature.”

At the November board meeting, Superintendent Roger León made a promise to fix the problems at Global Studies and visited the high school the following day to chat with Allen and other students, Allen said. But three weeks since students presented their concerns to the district, there has been no change, Allen added.

“It’s unacceptable today, in the past, and tomorrow for you to be raising an issue that adults are supposed to fix. You will help us fix it, but I promise you, it will be fixed,” said León to Allen during the November board meeting.

A teacher at Global Studies who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation said they see how the situation is “psychologically damaging” to Black students. During lunchtime, the teacher said they have seen Black students sitting alone. When asked why they seem sad, students say they feel uncomfortable at school. The teacher said parents, educators, and students have tried to handle these issues internally, but nothing has changed.

“The kids tried, they’ve been trying for years while they were there and the adults who were put there in charge to take care of them and make sure they’re treated fairly turned a blind eye to stuff,” the teacher said.

Johnson, a Newark native, said she hopes administrators can find solutions to the racist harassment Black students are describing because “she loves her community” and the people that make up her city.

“Keeping our kids safe is our priority because there’s so much stuff going on in this world, so much stuff going on in the city,” Johnson said.

In the meantime, Allen, the Global Studies junior, says he is juggling roles as student body president and founder of the Black Student Union, as well as a busy schedule and heavy class load, so he can only do so much to help. He hopes the district and leaders at his school find a way to make the experience of Black students better at the high school.

“They handle these matters the way a lot of non-Black people do. It’s very uncomfortable to talk about race, very uncomfortable. I understand that,” Allen said. “But the conversations are important, especially when they’re not being had.”

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Let go of your favorites: This educator urges critical thought about how books depict Native peoples

2022-12-14T21:04:41+00:00

Long before Dr. Debbie Reese earned her teaching degree at the University of New Mexico, she developed a love for educating others.

“I was one of those people who liked school so much when I was a kid that I would go home and make my siblings be my students,” said Reese, tribally enrolled at Nambé Owingeh and the founder of American Indians in Children’s Literature. “When I was in high school, I would ditch school, basically, and go to the Head Start and help the teachers there.”

A former classroom educator and university professor, Reese has written extensively about depictions of Native peoples in children’s books and co-edits a blog on the topic. In 2018, the American Library Association selected her to deliver the May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, which recognizes career contributions to children’s literature.

Reese spoke with Chalkbeat about her experiences as an educator, what sparked her interest in children’s books, and why it’s critical that schools do a better job educating their students about the more than 500 federally recognized Native nations in the United States.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did your experiences in education influence your approach to teaching?

I didn’t have any teachers who were critical of content in the ways that I am, so it’s not something I got from any of them. That awareness came as an adult when I started being in certain spaces that were completely ignorant of who we are and seeing that ignorance was based on romantic and stereotypical ideas that came from children’s books and mascots.

An awareness of how powerful stereotyping is became crystalized for me in my 30s when I started graduate school at the University of Illinois, where I got my Ph.D. That school had a mascot, which I was told about before I went there, and I thought, “Pfft, those don’t mean much.” But I got there and like, holy crap, people there really believed that was a good image of Native people. I went to the University of Illinois to study family literacy. This love of the mascot led me to think, “OK, so what’s going on in children’s storytelling that is feeding the love of this stereotypical mascot?”

I started paging through children’s books and seeing the ones that my daughter was finding at school and others that are just out there. I saw lots of it. Things like Grizzly Bob dressed up just like that mascot in “The Berenstain Bears Go to Camp.” I saw Clifford the Big Red Dog dressed up like an Indian as an option for his Halloween costume in “Clifford’s Halloween.” So I started to see just how much of that was out there.

When people [in Illinois] learned that I was part of that community, I would get invitations to come to this or that place. They wanted me to come and dance, and I would tell them, “No, we dance for spiritual purposes or at certain times of the year. I don’t dance for performance.” They would say, “Well, can you come and tell us a story,” and I would say, “No, I’m not a storyteller. I’m an educator. I’d be glad to come and talk to you about my own Pueblo Indian culture, history, all of that.” They didn’t want that. It was like, “Oh, well thank you, but no.”

What advice would you give teachers who want to do a better job of incorporating Native books into the classroom?

You must let go of your childhood favorites because the nostalgic embrace that you have for them is getting in the way of being able to do a better job. So many people feel like, “Oh, but ‘Little House on the Prairie.’” What I have found is that people will try to do both. They will try to use a problematic book and a book by a Native person, but then books by Native people aren’t seen as real, because the Native image doesn’t match the stereotype in that nostalgic book.

Dr. Debbie Reese, a former classroom educator and university professor, is the founder of American Indians in Children’s Literature.

What happens when Native stories aren’t told in the classroom? What impact does that have on Native students, who may feel that they are not being represented?

Or being misrepresented — I think that’s what we have most of all, because of those award-winning classic children’s books that get used in classrooms. Like “Arrow to the Sun.” It’s supposed to be a Pueblo Indian story, but it’s not. It’s a white fiction written by a white writer, who created what some think is pretty art, and that gets used in school classrooms to teach about Pueblo people, and it doesn’t.

So if you’re a Pueblo kid, and your teacher is reading that book to you, then you know that a kiva is not a scary place where you fight bees and all kinds of monsters, it’s a place of education. For that period of time, you’re listening to a teacher teach a book that has information in it that you know is wrong. So what do they do with that? I don’t think any little kid is actually able to articulate that or process it.

The data shows that Native kids don’t perform on testing as well as non-Native kids; that our kids drop out of school at higher rates than others; that Native people have higher suicide rates than others. I think this is all kind of a drip, drip, drip thing that our kids — or any kids whose people are misrepresented — deal with all the time. We don’t have very many counters to that.

These new books that are coming out do counter that, but teachers have to embrace them.

What happens when non-Native students only learn about Native Nations and peoples from books that perpetuate stereotypes?

They shouldn’t be using those books at all because they’re wrong, and these are educational spaces where parents are trusting a teacher to do right by their kids — whether that’s a Native kid or not. So Native kids are sitting there having to deal with this nonsense, and a non-Native kid is absorbing and regurgitating that information. For the non-Native kids who grow up to become book editors or maybe senators in the United States halls of power, they’re making decisions based on misinformation they got from childhood.

The ramifications for the harm done by these books are way greater than we know.

Do you have any favorite authors or books that you recommend to students or teachers?

I’m not going to answer that question because there are too many and I want teachers to explore all of them. I’m really pushing for teachers to understand how badly we were all educated about who Native peoples are, and so that means you really have to get to know many writers and what tribe they are from.

When you’re thinking about a Native writer — now here I’m going to say Eric Gansworth — when you’re using a book by Eric Gansworth, you can say, “Eric is a member of the Onondaga Nation. Here is Eric’s website.” Or I could do that same thing with any of the books — with Cynthia Leitich Smith, with Sharice [Davids], who has her biography out recently.

The key point is getting to know the author’s name and that author’s nation. And using the word “is” instead of “was.” Every time you’re talking about that author and that book, because teachers by default, everybody goes to “we were,” past tense. That has to fall by the wayside too. It has to be present tense. We can do that with Native books by Native writers.

Is there anything we haven’t talked about yet that you want to add?

People like to defend certain books, like “Little House on the Prairie,” by saying, “Well that’s what they thought back then,” implying that everybody was ignorant and racist at that time and everybody thought the same. That’s just not true. That’s an empty defense of a problematic book. For sure, during the time that series was set, and the time that it was published, not everybody thought that. Native people didn’t think they were savages.

The other thing is, I’m not doing any public speaking hardly at all because of COVID, but almost always, somebody in the audience will say, “Well, why can’t non-Native writers write these books? You’re trying to censor.” No, I’m not trying to censor. I’m trying to help you understand that Native people bring insights to this body of work that non-Native people don’t have access to. I get tired of that question. I get tired of people saying, “Well, why can’t a white writer do this?” Because the fact is, white writers do. They do it all the time. They continue to do it, and the books that they did 30 years ago continue to be used in classrooms today.

It’s not that they can’t. It’s a question of where we are in terms of today’s society, what we’re thinking about, what is appropriate, and what is best.

And what is best is Native books by Native writers.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering national issues. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

‘The hardest years of my career’: Principals say political combat has engulfed schools

2022-12-01T01:08:38+00:00

High school principals stand on the frontlines of the education culture wars. What they’ve witnessed\ there is troubling.

In Nebraska, someone brought a gun to a school board meeting. In Iowa, a classroom discussion about current events dissolved into a shouting match. In California, one irate parent called a principal a “liberal communist moron,” and another told a school board: “We’re coming for you.”

Those incidents are examples of the hostility that increasingly surrounds schools, according to a new report based on a nationwide survey of public high school principals. Nearly 7 in 10 principals said that conflicts erupted in their school communities last academic year over hot-button political issues, and almost half said such controversies occur more frequently now than before the pandemic.

Schools in politically divided communities experienced a greater number of conflicts, which have been fueled by a conservative campaign to limit teaching about race and racism, curtail access to books deemed inappropriate, and restrict LGBTQ students’ rights, according to the report by researchers at UCLA and the University of California, Riverside.

In Palmer, Alaska, Principal Mary Fulp faced intense criticism this fall after word spread that a transgender student at Fulp’s high school had used the girls’ locker room. After a public outcry, the school board last month banned trans students from using bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity.

“It is the hardest time to be an educator that I’ve ever experienced,” Fulp told Chalkbeat. “The pandemic, the political climate — it is all hard.”

In recent years, schools have moved ever closer to the center of the country’s hyper-partisan political debates as efforts to promote antiracism and LGBTQ-inclusion in some schools sparked a conservative backlash. Republican lawmakers in dozens of states have proposed laws that restrict lessons on contentious topics and erode protections for LGBTQ students.

Based on a nationally representative survey this summer of more than 680 high school principals, the new report shows how thoroughly that backlash has engulfed schools.

In different survey questions, half of principals said that parents or community members have tried to limit lessons on race and racism, roughly half said LGBTQ-inclusive policies have faced challenges, nearly 40% said social-emotional learning has come under attack, and a third said attempts have been made to stop students from accessing certain books.

Each of those challenges occurred more often in schools in politically divided communities, which the researchers defined as those congressional districts where former President Donald Trump received around half of the vote in the 2020 presidential elections. The researchers attribute this not only to people with different values living in those communities, but also to efforts by conservative activists and politicians to rile up parents for political gain.

“What’s changed in the last four years is this targeting public schools as the site of conflict,” said UCLA Professor John Rogers, who directs the school’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access. “It’s not just that schools are mirroring these broader dynamics, but they become the theater in which these conflicts are playing out.”

Rogers co-authored the report with Joseph Kahne, a UC Riverside professor who co-directs that school’s Civic Engagement Research Group; other researchers also contributed to the study.

Previous studies and reporting have shown how the new laws and public scrutiny have led teachers to cut short classroom discussions about racism and sexuality, either due to pressure from administrators or self-censorship. The new report centers high school principals, who often are well-known in their communities and subject to intense political pressure.

In addition to the survey, the researchers also interviewed more than 30 principals, who are given pseudonyms in the report. Able to speak freely due to the anonymity, the school leaders expressed frustration and fear about the effect that partisan clashes have had on their faculties and students.

Nearly 70% of principals said students have made disparaging remarks about classmates due to their political beliefs, and more than 60% said political disagreements have made classrooms more tense.

An Iowa principal said her teachers are scared of being “accosted by a student or a community member for what they’re teaching.” After some students started “screaming at each other” during class, the principal told the teacher to end class discussions about current events.

“There’s a level of intolerance and refusal to understand the other side that I haven’t seen before the pandemic,” a Tennessee principal told the researchers.

The principals also said that hostility toward LGBTQ students has become more common. In politically divided districts, about a third of principals said students made anti-LGBTQ remarks on multiple occasions last school year — three times the rate in 2018. Many parents also expressed anti-LGBTQ sentiments, the principals reported.

A California principal said some parents opposed policies meant to protect transgender students and lashed out at staffers for supporting LGBTQ students.

“My teachers, administrators, and nurses came to me on a weekly basis in tears because parents are shouting and cursing at them for doing their jobs,” the principal said. “One counselor described to me how a parent screamed at her on the phone and called her a ‘homo lover.’”

The distrust and even rage directed at schools has made it harder to hire and retain teachers, some principals said. The backlash has also created a chilling effect, with some school boards and superintendents restricting lessons about race and racism, according to the survey. Once again, the restrictions were most common in politically divided districts.

“My superintendent told me in no uncertain terms that I could not address issues of race and bias etc. with students or staff this year,” said a Minnesota principal quoted in the report.

The constant strain of trying to avoid or weather controversy has worn educators down, several principals said. A Massachusetts principal said criticism of him and his school has felt “nonstop” and “borders on harassment and bullying.”

“The past two years have been the hardest years of my career,” he told the researchers, “and they have left me worried about the future of public education.”

Still, the report does include examples of principals standing up for what the researchers call a “diverse democracy,” where people with different viewpoints and identities listen to one another and work together. Some school leaders defended the rights of LGBTQ students and encouraged frank classroom discussions about difficult topics, including racism.

Fulp, the Alaska principal, who was not part of the study, said she saw the recent controversy surrounding her school as an opportunity to model civility. She listened with an open mind even when community members disparaged her online and a parent confronted her in the post office. And she told her students that everyone deserve respect and protection, even after the board restricted transgender students’ rights.

“I feel like history is being written in our schools today,” she said. “So what story are we going to contribute to?”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Denver district relinquishes ‘Know Justice, Know Peace’ podcast trademark, asks lawsuit be dismissed

2022-11-22T21:23:45+00:00

Two months after four young Black women sued Denver Public Schools for trying to trademark the name of a racial justice podcast they started, the district said it is relinquishing the trademark.

In a court document filed Friday, the district said it “renounces any claim of ownership over the trademark Know Justice, Know Peace for a podcast” and “any efforts to monetize” the name. Denver Public Schools asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit against it.

If a judge agrees, it will end a high-profile dispute that attracted national media attention and earned Denver Public Schools — a district whose superintendent has said he wants to dismantle racist systems — significant criticism from local community members who accused the district of asserting ownership over something Black students created.

“It’s almost ironic how us as Black students, learning about our history, learning about how as Black people, oftentimes our ideas are stolen, our history is stolen, all of our things are watered down, that now we’re in a situation where our name and our brand and this work that we’ve continually built up is potentially being taken away,” Kaliah Yizar, one of the students who founded the podcast, said at a press conference in September.

In a statement Monday, the district said its trademark attempt was an effort to ensure the podcast could continue in Denver Public Schools.

“From the beginning, we have repeatedly stated that our efforts were about protecting this important educational tool for our scholars,” district spokesperson Will Jones said in a statement. “Now that these young ladies are in a position to actually own this intellectual property on their own, we are thrilled that it will soon be theirs.”

Yizar and three other students at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Early College high school started the podcast, called “Know Justice, Know Peace: The Take,” in the summer of 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd. They had support from educators at the school, including then-Principal Kimberly Grayson, and were eventually paid by the district as apprentices.

The podcast was successful. The students appeared on the “Today Show” and participated virtually in a White House summit on educational equity. Their advocacy also spurred the district to pledge to diversify its curriculum to include Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous history.

After their former principal, Grayson, left the school last spring, the students decided they wanted to continue their podcast independently. They said they asked Grayson for help. In June, she filed paperwork to form a business called Know Justice, Know Peace: The Take LLC.

When Denver Public Schools learned of the LLC, it filed state and federal trademark applications for the podcast name in August.

“Our concern has never been with any of our students,” Jones said in a statement. “It has always been with this former employee trying to obtain this intellectual property.”

But the students, two of whom are now graduated, didn’t see it that way. In an August meeting, they told district officials that the podcast was theirs, with one student describing it as “our faces, who we are.” And in September, they sued Denver Public Schools for trademark infringement.

In its motion to dismiss Friday, the district attached copies of documents its lawyers filed to withdraw its state and federal trademark applications. In a statement, Jones said the district recently learned that Grayson signed over the LLC to one of the former students, who can now “file for and receive this intellectual property as their own.”

The district isn’t letting go of the podcast idea, though. It plans to expand the opportunity for students to make a racial justice podcast, Jones said, and will hold a naming contest soon.

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia school board approves grant to teach anti-racism in elementary schools

2022-11-18T17:55:17+00:00

The Philadelphia school district will partner with a nonprofit organization to coach teachers in three elementary schools on avoiding racism in their teaching, thanks to an $84,000 initiative the school board approved Thursday.

The money for the Children’s Literacy Initiative will fund an early learning specialist who will coach teachers on techniques including anti-racist early literacy instruction, understanding structural bias, and designing lesson plans that foster diversity, equity, and inclusion, the district said.

The contract provides “embedded coaching” at Mary McLeod Bethune, Dr. Tanner G. Duckrey, and William Cramp schools, and runs through June 30 of next year. School board members approved the contract without comment.

The initiative dovetails with state standards released by the Pennsylvania Department of Education this week that are designed to have teachers address institutional racism and their own biases, and to counter racist practices in schools, the radio station WHYY reported.

The Children’s Literacy Initiative is a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that works with schools around the country to improve literacy rates for early learners in economically disadvantaged schools.

“Teachers will receive side-by-side, job-embedded coaching to ensure quality and successful implementation, and children may see this reflected in the instruction,” a district spokeswoman said in an email to Chalkbeat.

The coach will work directly with teachers in kindergarten through second grade, as well as administrators, making weekly visits to each school, she said.

The program also calls for “teacher professional learning communities,” which are group sessions that focus on literacy objectives and differentiating instruction to meet children’s diverse needs. It also features “school based leadership team meetings” that aim to build principals’ and school leaders’ familiarity with the initiative and ensure they can review progress.

The program will allow teachers to customize lesson plans to class demographics, and will give school leaders the skills to ensure classroom materials are “culturally responsive,” the district said.

While initially limited to three schools, the program may be expanded to others as the district evaluates its success, the spokeswoman said.

The Hamilton Community Foundation and the Neubauer Family Foundation provided funding for the project, according to the district’s description of the initiative.

Correction: An earlier version incorrectly identified the organization receiving the grant. It is the Children’s Literacy Initiative.

Black students don’t need your ‘tough love.’ They need compassion.

2022-11-14T21:00:00+00:00

It is time to address a harsh reality that most prefer not to discuss: More than a century and a half after slavery was abolished, the dehumanization of Black children continues in classrooms across the country.

It isn’t only the low expectations, stereotypes, and adultification of Black youth that undermines their physical, emotional, and academic well-being. A vast empathy divide also threatens their lives.

White children are generally treated with more trust, compassion, and lighter discipline. Black children typically face harsh discipline, surveillance, and aggressive enforcement cast as “tough love.”

This empathy deficit isn’t only levied by white teachers who through implicit and explicit bias believe Black children need an aggressive hand. Black teachers sometimes admonish their students of color more harshly as a means of teaching them to survive, the result of hard-won lessons passed down for centuries.

We have seen this reality over and over again, both as longtime social workers and educators and in our own lives. But what we’ve come to believe is that Black children don’t need “toughness.” Life is already tough for many of them. They need an abundance of love that is propped up with empathy and compassion.

Dr. Barbara Milton: Making sure I was successful in the white dominant culture was a job my mother and grandmother took seriously and with the best intentions when I was growing up. At the first sign of tears, I was rebuked: Don’t cry! Tears show weakness! You can’t be weak in a white world!

Another admonishment: Never look white people in the eyes. It’s too risky and could unleash trouble. And no matter how hard I worked, I heard: Don’t be lazy! Black people have to work twice as hard! Show them you are up for any task!

They thought this tough love would provide me with the armor needed to withstand and plow through the abundance of racism that would try and hold me back. It worked, but the cost of steeling myself emotionally and adhering to these rules was far too high. I adopted a persona that wasn’t my true self.

Now, as an adult, I have had to strip away the tough love learning and find the gentle love and compassion that’s needed to heal and be resilient in a world where racism continues to try and undo the strength of Black people’s hearts, minds, and souls.

I have gratitude for how my mother prepared me for a rough world. But I now know there is another way to lift up Black youth. I use the strategies of empathy and compassion, not just in my personal life but professionally in my work with youth and families from marginalized communities.

My clients often remarked that their encounters with me were different because they felt seen, heard, and valued as human beings. I was aware that my stance in working with them stood in stark contrast to their encounters with other, mostly white professionals. Love and respect became the cornerstone of my work with Black youth and families.

Dr. Deborah Brooks Lawrence: I was one of the few Black kids in my school. For the most part, everyone left me alone, and that was OK with my fifth grade self. For a class assignment, I made a painting that caught my principal’s attention. He saw it and asked, “Who did this very creative work?” I said, “I did.” With suspicion, he claimed, “That’s nice, but I don’t think you did this because you are culturally deprived.” My teacher didn’t say a word.

When youth of color fall, schools fail to catch them, parceling out tough love instead.

While the language might be different today, versions of this scenario still play out for Black youth. When educators don’t believe in their Black students, it is exasperating and exhausting.

If we want Black children to be able to process those experiences, they need to feel the safety of comfort and compassion. When it happened to me, my mother said, “You have to get used to it and just keep going.” But compassion is what helps build that resilience.

Drs. Milton and Brooks Lawrence: Often, Black youth build up a hardened façade in response to the lack of understanding of their lives and the racism they face in and outside of school. At the same time, as they watch the murders of Black people at the hands of the police, they get the message that it is safer to be more invisible.

Like our caregivers, well-meaning Black teachers admonish youth of color to protect them from the cost of challenging or “offending” white authority. It is a tightrope walk, and many Black youth lose their balance somewhere between hypervigilance and inner turmoil. Yet, tragically, when youth of color fall, schools fail to catch them, parceling out tough love instead.

It is time for all educators to treat Black youth humanely. Look underneath behaviors and attitudes that at first blush may seem arrogant and even antisocial, but are likely expressions of ability with no easy outlets.

Using Sankofa, from Ghana, meaning “go back to the past and bring forward what is useful,” work with students of color facing challenges. Listen, using patience rather than punishment. Help them draw on their inherited wisdom and resilience. If you do, you will change a life, and possibly even save one.

Drs. Milton and Brooks Lawrence are the authors of “Inherited Wisdom: Drawing on the Lessons of Formerly Enslaved Ancestors to Lift Up Black Youth,” by Cognella Press.

Here are the big education donors in New York’s governor’s race

2022-11-08T00:20:10+00:00

Gov. Kathy Hochul and Lee Zeldin, her Republican opponent, have built large campaign war chests as they seek to win New York state’s highest office on Tuesday.

While education-focused groups haven’t stuck out as either candidate’s biggest donors, both candidates have received some substantial donations from those who exert influence on New York’s education world — helping to paint a clearer picture of who is hoping to have sway over schools policy.

Hochul has touted boosting funding for public schools while in office and has earned the endorsements of powerful teachers unions. She recently revealed that she supported lifting the cap on how many charter schools can open in New York.

Zeldin has voiced strong support for school choice, including charters and private choice options, and has embraced conservative talking points about banning “divisive curriculum” related to race and restricting “age-inappropriate” sex education.

Hochul’s campaign has garnered contributions from some of the biggest players, such as educator unions, while Zeldin has gained the support of some of the nation’s wealthiest businessmen.

Hochul’s campaign has collected nearly $54 million since she took office in August 2021, according to the most recent contributions report on the New York State Board of Elections website. Zeldin’s campaign has garnered nearly $24 million since he announced his candidacy for governor in April 2021.

Here are some highlights of who’s contributed to both campaigns as voters head to the polls Tuesday:

Hochul

Hochul has received contributions from every major educator union: $69,700 from the political committee associated with the state teachers union, New York State United Teachers, or the maximum allowed contribution across primary and general statewide elections; $47,100 from the city teachers union, representing the maximum allowed during a general election; $5,000 from the city’s principals union in September 2021, about a month after Hochul confirmed she would run; and the maximum $69,700 from the national American Federation of Teachers.

The city teachers union has also “engaged our own membership in this election through a combination of digital ads, mailers, emails, texts, robo and live calls in support of the Hochul-Delgado ticket,” said spokesperson Alison Gendar.

The union has praised Hochul for boosting funding for schools and signing a bill that aims to reduce class sizes in New York City public schools. Michael Mulgrew, president of the city teachers union, called Hochul “the best advocate for New York City students and educators in a generation,” when Hochul visited the union’s delegate assembly last month.

Before endorsing Hochul, the state teachers union hadn’t thrown its support behind a gubernatorial candidate since 2006, said spokesperson Matt Hamilton. The union often had an adversarial relationship with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, especially over school funding and how state tests factored into teacher evaluations.

In endorsing Hochul in January, the union’s president, Andy Pallotta, said in a statement that Hochul’s “commitment to listening to the needs of our members” is the sign of a “new day” in the state’s capitol.

Hochul’s contributions show she also has some support in the charter sector. New Yorkers for Putting Students First, the political action committee for pro-charter, education reform advocacy organization StudentsFirst NY, gave Hochul $40,000 in September 2021. The committee also donated to Hochul when she was lieutenant governor.

She also received $30,000 this year from the Great Public Schools Political Action Committee, which was created by Eva Moskowitz, who founded New York’s largest charter network, Success Academy. That committee had previously also supported Cuomo. A representative for Success Academy declined to comment on the donation. Eric Grannis, Moskowitz’ husband who was previously listed as the committee’s main contact, did not immediately respond for comment.

That donation came far before Hochul revealed in a recent debate with Zeldin that she, like Zeldin, supports lifting New York’s cap on how many charter schools can open.

Hochul also received $10,000 in October 2021 from the New York School Bus Contractors Association’s political action committee. The organization represents about 100 school transportation companies, according to its website.

Zeldin

While it doesn’t appear that any major education organizations have donated to Zeldin’s campaign, he’s received large sums from Dan Loeb and Ronald Lauder, two billionaires who have gained attention for their views on education policy.

Loeb, who is the CEO of a New York City-based asset management firm called Third Point LLC, donated the maximum $47,100 allowed in general elections to Zeldin’s campaign last month. In the education world, Loeb sits on the board of trustees for Success Academy and was previously the network’s chairperson. CNBC reported in the spring that Loeb, who had contributed $1 million to a political action committee that supported Mayor Eric Adams during the mayoral campaign last year, had been advocating for charter schools in private discussions with Adams.

On Third Point’s website, Loeb’s profile notes that he’s been “an advocate for reforming America’s schools to ensure all children have access to high quality education.” He donated roughly $250,000 over the summer to New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany, a political action committee with ties to Students First New York.

Zeldin first announced his campaign’s education agenda in front of a Success Academy campus in Queens. He said he supports lifting the charter cap and more generally supports school choice, including establishing “tax credits for school choice” and creating education savings accounts, which families can use to withdraw their children from public schools and receive tax dollars to pay for private school or other educational options like therapy.

Representatives for Third Point declined to comment on why Loeb is supporting Zeldin.

Lauder, who donated nearly $61,000 to Zeldin’s campaign, gained attention in 2019 for bankrolling a lobbying effort to preserve the Specialized High Schools Admission Test, which is the single exam students take to gain entry to eight of New York City’s nine specialized high schools.

Lauder has exerted significant influence over the governor’s race this year, spending $11 million so far on getting Zeldin elected, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

How one Colorado Republican shaped what students will learn about the Holocaust

2022-10-12T12:30:00+00:00

A Republican State Board of Education member who believes socialism poses grave dangers at home and abroad has put his stamp on how Colorado students will learn about the Holocaust.

Over the last year and a half, Steve Durham has pushed for the state’s academic standards to connect the Holocaust and other genocides to socialism. Durham succeeded in omitting the word Nazi from an early version of the standards in favor of the party’s full name, the National Socialist German Workers Party.

Durham agreed to include the word Nazi after Jewish community members lobbied the State Board of Education — so long as the full name with the word socialist remained.

“People don’t know and have a right to know that this party was and is a socialist party,” Durham said at an August State Board meeting. “That is largely lost on the American people and on a number of history teachers as well. I oppose dumbing down the standards.”

Historians say Durham is wrong about the Holocaust and wrong about the roots of genocide. The idea that Nazis were socialists is “a lie,” according to David Ciarlo, a University of Colorado history professor who studies German politics. “It’s completely wrong.”

Still, Durham has exerted outsized influence over the standards related to genocide, which are meant to guide teaching across Colorado. A key section largely authored by Durham overrides recommendations from a committee of teachers and experts. The approved standards drop references to genocide in Rwanda, for example, while adding detailed references to the Communist Party of China.

The standards as written “absolutely suggest to teachers that they should be making a connection” between genocide and socialism, said John Gallup, a history teacher in Jeffco Public Schools who recently returned from Auschwitz as part of a fellowship on teaching genocide and reviewed the standards at Chalkbeat’s request.

Durham’s sway, despite his misleading historical claims about the Holocaust, raises questions about the State Board’s ability to accurately referee conflicts over teaching history as its members tackle a contentious update to the broader social studies standards — and at a moment when those fights are erupting nationwide. And in a state where teachers have limited access to Holocaust-specific curriculum or training programs, some see the attention being paid to socialism as a disturbing distraction.

“It feels very antisemitic, quite frankly,” said Democratic state Rep. Dafna Michaelson-Jenet, co-sponsor of legislation requiring Holocaust education statewide. She sees the latest standards as an effort to score political points rather than teach about the murder of Jews and other minority groups. “You’re erasing the violence that happened by making it something that it wasn’t.”

The Holocaust has become another contested curriculum issue, with books like the acclaimed “Maus” by Art Spiegelman banned by a Tennessee school board.

The Holocaust becomes contested territory

The meaning and memory of the Holocaust have become yet another battleground in the fight over what students should learn about history, race, and gender. A Texas school administrator told teachers to balance books on the Holocaust with “opposing views.” A Tennessee school board voted to remove the acclaimed graphic novel “Maus” from its curriculum due to its “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.”

The Holocaust also remains a potent symbol of evil to be used — or misused — in political arguments. Opponents of vaccine mandates have donned yellow star badges similar to those the Nazis forced Jews to wear. At a rally last year, Republican congresswoman and conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene linked the Nazis and today’s Democratic Party by describing both as “national socialist parties.”

But teaching the Holocaust wasn’t supposed to be divisive in Colorado.

A state law passed in 2020 with broad bipartisan support required that students learn about the Holocaust and other genocides before graduating high school. (Many schools already included the Holocaust in history and literature classes, but it was not a requirement.)

Following the legislation, a committee of experts and teachers prepared recommendations for what students should learn. When the Democrat-majority State Board received them in spring 2021, Republicans raised a host of objections, many driven by contemporary political concerns — a theme of the discussions that would take place over the next year.

Republicans objected to references to mass violence, for example, saying the standards should then also reference recent violent protests in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle following the murder of George Floyd.

Durham saw something else wrong with the recommendations. While they mentioned the Cambodian genocide, they were silent on the crimes of the Soviet Union and Communist China. He proposed adding these events and said the standards should name the governments — such as the National Socialist German Workers Party — that carried out genocides.

Board Chair Angelika Schroeder, a Democrat, was largely silent on the substance of these discussions and later declined an interview request. She and fellow Democrat Rebecca McClellan ultimately voted with the Republicans to adopt Durham’s proposal, with McClellan praising the inclusion of the oppression of the Uyghurs.

Durham also proposed that students discuss the question: Why are so many modern genocides associated with socialist and communist governments?

That question didn’t make it into the standards — his colleagues simply ignored it — but Durham said in an interview, “I hope that students make that connection.”

Critics say they agree that students should learn about genocides carried out by the Soviet Union and China, but they worry that Durham’s list distorts history by excluding many other examples. Durham isn’t interested in that argument.

He dismissed Michaelson-Jenet’s concerns as playing the “race card.” Informed that many scholars disagree that socialists are the only source of genocidal violence, Durham asked a reporter, “Do they miss Pol Pot?”

Steve Durham is a former history teacher and legislator who represents Colorado Springs on the State Board of Education.

Durham challenged the reporter to name any genocides committed by regimes that weren’t socialist, then rejected any examples as not truly conservative.

“There is some truth out there that students need to understand,” Durham said. “Weak government, limited government cannot engage in this kind of activity. Socialism by definition is big government. It doesn’t mean that they all commit genocide, but they are the ones capable of it.”

Experts say Durham’s ideas are incorrect

Historians and educators say Durham’s comments and the emphasis of the standards he crafted are misguided. They say it’s important for students to understand that governments of all stripes have committed genocide. It’s also important for students to understand that mass murder often starts with words that dehumanize and demonize.

“Genocide is carried out by leftist governments and governments on the right, and it is not just a crime carried out by authoritarian states or dictatorships. Democracies have carried out genocides,” said University of Northern Arizona professor Alexander Alvarez, a genocide scholar who serves on his state’s task force charged with improving Holocaust and genocide education in K-12 classrooms.

“If we think genocide is just carried out by communist governments, we don’t have to look at our own history, or we can think that we are immune to the forces that lead to genocide.”

Seeing the term socialism through a modern American lens is also a mistake, historians and educators said.

The Nazis rose to power as a racist right-wing party virulently opposed to socialism and communism, according to historians interviewed by Chalkbeat and resources provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The first concentration camp, Dachau, opened in 1933 to house political prisoners, many of them communists and social democrats.

In 1920s Germany, the term “national socialism” represented a kind of racist populism that put the interests of ethnic Germans above others. The term stood in contrast to “international socialism” and “international capitalism,” both of which were associated with Jews to falsely blame them for harming the German people. While an early Nazi party platform included some socialist ideas, leaders soon ignored them and those ideas became irrelevant to the party’s rise.

“What’s important is that they demonized their opponents,” Ciarlo said.

Through a letter-writing campaign and in private meetings with board members, Jewish groups raised concerns that the initial version of the standards adopted in 2021 without the term Nazi missed the mark. Most students have heard of Nazis before they encounter them in history class. If students then learned only about the National Socialist German Workers Party, would they understand the party’s defining ideology was belief in German racial superiority that justified killing or enslaving other peoples?

“It’s essential that when they hear the term Nazi they connect it to a genocidal society,” said Dan Leshem, a Holocaust educator and director of the Colorado Jewish Community Relations Council. “We need to be horrified and shaken and shook.”

Compromise keeps ‘a piece of indoctrination’

This year, the State Board had another shot at the standards covering the Holocaust and genocide. The entire social studies standards are up for review, and the standards committee recommended new language in June that included the Soviet Union and China along with Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur — without the emphasis on socialism so important to Durham.

Democratic board member Karla Esser said she heard the concerns of the Jewish community and shared them. She brought an amendment in August to describe the Holocaust as “carried out by the German Nazi Party and its collaborators.” Esser and McClellan also pushed back during a board meeting when Durham said the Nazis were socialists.

Esser’s amendment was adopted unanimously by the State Board. Alongside the addition of the term Nazi, it restored much of Durham’s socialism-focused language and replaced the simpler language the committee had recommended.

In an interview, Esser said the language was a compromise, one she felt confident could get at least four votes on the seven-member board. She knew Durham felt as strongly about having the word socialist in the standards as she did about using the word Nazi.

“That is his belief,” Esser said. “In my estimation, it’s a piece of indoctrination. I don’t think the standards should reflect our worldviews. They should reflect recorded history, with the understanding that there is always a point of view in history.”

But Esser gave Durham credit for listening, and said she doubted his interpretation would reach students. “Most teachers and most textbooks are not going to try to indoctrinate our students,” she said.

Michaelson-Jenet, the legislator, said the result ignores the intent of the bill requiring Holocaust education. The goal was to equip young people with basic knowledge about the Holocaust, something she saw many people lacked during her time leading the Holocaust Awareness Institute at the University of Denver, and teach them how intolerance can turn into genocide.

Yet State Board members also seemed to lack a basic understanding of how genocide happens, she said, and they didn’t consult experts who could have informed their decisions.

“If we want to actually get to the point where we’re teaching what hatred looks like, this is not the way to do it,” she said. “I don’t see anything about that goal.”

What does this mean for students and teachers?

The compromise language agreed on by the State Board is part of a broader update to Colorado’s social studies standards set to be finalized in November. In the next few weeks, the same State Board will consider new civics standards and whether to expand references to the contributions of communities of color and LGBTQ Americans, as required by a state law passed in 2019.

State standards represent what Colorado students are supposed to know and what Colorado schools are supposed to teach. But school districts also have broad discretion to make their own choices. Durham, a big believer in local control, is quick to say no teacher has to follow his lead.

Gallup, the history teacher in Jeffco Public Schools, said he’d be surprised to see school districts formally adopt Durham’s political framing. “I think teachers will look at this, and to be honest, they’ll use that language as they see fit and they’ll make that choice in their own classroom,” he said.

School districts have until July 2023 to incorporate the new genocide standards into an existing course required for graduation. The state is developing an online resource library to help.

Leshem said his focus now is ensuring teachers have the resources to teach the topic well. Recent surveys show a disturbing ignorance about the Holocaust among younger Americans, even in states that mandate genocide education. And every year, there are fewer survivors left who can share first-hand accounts. Colorado also lacks the museums, the teacher training programs, the funding, and the well-developed curriculum on the issue that other states have.

The goal of Holocaust education is ultimately genocide prevention. Ciarlo asks his students: “We all know that Nazism should never happen again because of the Holocaust. There’s a lesson there. What’s the lesson? What should not be repeated?”

History does not offer easy answers. Demonizing minority groups and political opponents proved an effective way to gain power. Millions of Germans found the Nazis’ extremism alluring, and millions more looked the other way as their neighbors were murdered. The Nazis were not defeated peacefully, and genocides continue to happen around the world.

The Holocaust needs to be placed in historical context, not twisted to fit our own, educators said. At the same time, students should be able to see commonalities among genocides and make connections to our own society. Doing so will make us better, Leshem said, especially in a time when immigrants are being demonized and there is pressure to look away from the uglier aspects of American history.

Students should also understand the Holocaust was not carried out by monsters, but by ordinary people who had within them a common capacity for cruelty, Leshem said. Many of us have that same capacity, but we don’t have to act on it.

Gallup said that’s a lesson he took home from Auschwitz, where guides made a point of presenting the camp guards as human beings who “got up in the morning and put their pants on one leg at a time.” So were the Germans who resisted in ways large and small. And that’s the lesson he plans to emphasize for his own Jeffco students.

“The kids just have to see that, that people made choices,” he said.

How Colorado’s Holocaust and genocide standards evolved

A 2020 Colorado law requires that students learn about the Holocaust before graduating high school. A standards committee of teachers and other experts made recommendations to the State Board of Ed, which adopted genocide standards in June 2021. Those standards were revisited and revised this year as part of a broader update of the social studies standards. Colorado schools have until July 2023 to incorporate these standards into a course required for graduation.

Here’s how the standards changed over time.

April 2021: Standards recommended by a committee of teachers and other experts mentioned five prominent 20th century genocides. These were not adopted.

Investigate causes and effects of significant events throughout world history. For example: the Renaissance; the Protestant Reformation; the Industrial Revolution; the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions; the World Wars; genocides such as Rwanda and Darfur; and the Arab Spring movement.

June 2021: Genocide standards adopted by the Colorado State Board of Education added the full name of the Nazi Party, more information about atrocities committed by communist governments, and labels to describe the type of genocide.

Students can: Evaluate continuity and change of historical events [including] 20th and 21st century genocides such as the Armenian Genocide (ethno-religious, national); the Holocaust conducted by the National Socialist German Workers Party and its collaborators (ethno-religious, political, racial, national, economic), Cambodian Genocide (political, economic); the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics murder of Ukrainian nationals (political, ethnic, national, economic), genocides conducted by the Communist Party of China (CPC) against its political opponents during the Totalization Period, Collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s Famine (political, national), and the current genocide of the Uyghurs (ethno-religious, political)

June 2022: Standards recommended by the Colorado social studies standards committee incorporated much of the same content but without the labels, which many experts felt were overly restrictive and simplistic, and without full names of parties and nation-states. These were not adopted.

Students can: Examine and evaluate the historical context, consequences, and global responses to international atrocities throughout history. Including, but not limited to: 20th and 21st century genocides such a Armenia, the Holocaust, Ukraine (Holodomor), Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, and the modern genocide of the Uyghurs; and other acts of mass violence such as the political, economic, and social policies of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and resulting Great Famine.

August 2022: Standards adopted by the Colorado State Board of Education added the reference to the German Nazi Party, restored the full names of parties and nation-states, and dropped the labels. These will be included in the full social studies standards update in November unless the State Board revisits them.

Students can: Evaluate continuity and change over the course of world history. For example: social and political movements related to nationality, ethnicity, and gender; revolutions; the World Wars; the Cold War; independence movements/decolonization and 20th century genocides such as the Armenian Genocide; the Holocaust perpetrated by the German Nazi Party and it’s collaborators (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), Cambodian Genocide; the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics murder of Ukrainian nationals; genocides conducted by the Communist Party of China (CPC) against its political opponents during the Totalization Period, Collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s Famine; and the current genocide of the Uyghurs.

Bureau Chief Erica Meltzer covers education policy and politics and oversees Chalkbeat Colorado’s education coverage. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

A teacher made me watch the video of Tamir Rice’s killing. What happened next still haunts me.

2022-10-05T18:05:53+00:00

One afternoon at the beginning of eighth grade, I was sitting in the room where Model United Nations (we called it MUN) met after school. Students played the roles of ambassadors. We talked about the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the immigration policies of the Obama administration, and police brutality in the United States, among other topics.

Sometimes there was yelling and crying, and occasionally a silence heavy with more meaning than any words could ever have. But there was rarely accountability when people said hurtful things.

Kayla Ruano-Lumpris

Whenever we had these emotional moments, I stared intently at my shoes. As a perfectionist who didn’t like revealing my imperfect feelings, I carefully crafted a hard exterior. On top of that, being one of the few Black and Latina people in predominantly white schools all my life made me feel like an outsider and, thus, even more afraid of expressing my opinions, particularly those on race-related topics.

That day, it was getting dark outside, and only the MUN advisor, four other girls, and I remained in the room. I was friends, or at least acquaintances, with these girls, but I kept a wall up around them. The room was big, but all of us sat clustered together near the projector at the front of the room.

At some point, the conversation turned to the 2014 murder of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy shot by a white policeman immediately upon arriving on the scene. The officer claimed he thought Tamir’s BB gun was a firearm. In the officer’s eyes, Tamir was not a young boy, but a grown, dangerous man.

My advisor was shocked when I told him that I had never seen the video of the shooting, as though it were a rite of passage for a young Black person to see one of their own people brutally killed.

“You really need to see this,” my advisor, a tall white man, insisted. I felt it wasn’t necessary for me to view the video. I already felt connected to Tamir and his family. Their reality could have easily been mine.

The other girls scooted closer to the projector. Only one of them was Black. I don’t know how she felt about being made to view the video, but neither of us said anything.

I had a bad feeling about what we were about to see, but it was hard to disagree with our advisor. He had a deep, confident voice that made everything sound important. Everyone in MUN competed for his approval, and he encouraged it. The person I was then, desperate to be liked, particularly by authority figures, felt I had no choice but to watch the video.

So, there I was, waiting as this teacher casually cued up a video of a child being killed as though we were about to watch the Weather Channel.

The first thing I saw was the blurred figure of a boy walking with something in his hand, an object I already knew was a toy gun. The shooting happens so quickly you can blink and miss it. I froze.

Watching someone take a human life was shocking. The officer pulls the trigger without even hesitating, and I still wonder how someone could do that. I felt myself about to cry. Instead, I blinked furiously and bit my cheek hard, until the metallic taste blood distracted me from the tears.

My advisor then announced that he wanted to listen to the audio (the video was silent). I didn’t know how to say no.

For me, hearing it was the worst part: the dispatch, the gunshot, the police commentary, all of it, each little piece of the story chipping away at the tough exterior I had placed around my sensitive heart.

When I heard 12 years of life ending in two seconds, my vision turned blurry as my eyes welled up with salty tears. What hurt the most was hearing the officers walk over to Tamir’s body and claim that they just shot an 18-year-old man — as if he were old enough to vote and drive and get drafted. Tamir was a 12-year-old kid.

My tough exterior shattered, and the emotions I had been holding back flooded out of my eyes and stained my face wet with tears. My hands shook erratically as the audio replayed in my head over and over, the gunshots still ringing in my ears. It was a humbling, hopeless feeling to realize my life could be taken away so easily.

As embarrassed as I was, it was almost a relief to feel so much at once. I had mostly lived my life with a quiet intensity, rarely stating my thoughts and opinions. I thought I could keep my sadness, rage, and frustration bottled up inside, but I was a volcano just waiting to erupt.

My sniffles and quiet sobs disrupted the uncomfortable stillness. I felt alone even with these people near me. My innocence was stripped away from me so early in my life. Why should they get to keep theirs?

As I began to collect myself, I glanced at the faces of my advisor and peers. My advisor smiled in a way I could only interpret as condescending. Did he see me as some naive student, now enlightened because of what he just showed us?

The eyes of my white classmates shifted from my gaze as they saw the pain on my face. At that moment, I started to realize that I could spend the rest of my life being subject to the opinions of people who made me feel separate and lesser, or I could be bold and force people to hear what I have to say.

After what we had seen and heard, I had an argument with one of my white peers. She didn’t feel that the officers should be held fully accountable for their actions.

“They were trying to do their job,” she argued.

“At the expense of a child’s life?” I said, aggravated.

“People said he was pointing a gun!”

“And a police officer should know the difference between a BB gun and a real one!”

The other girls watched with their eyes wide. Our advisor stood there quietly, remaining frustratingly neutral. Hot tears rolled onto my cheeks. The other Black girl didn’t say much, besides an occasional chime of agreement with me. Does she still think about this too?

Sometimes, I wish it never happened, and it shouldn’t have, but the strong emotions ignited a fire within me.

I was finally using my voice, so I didn’t let up, not until I saw the moon glistening through the open windows and knew I should head home. I was still angry at my classmate, my advisor, and the world. Everyone else’s visible emotions quickly faded as they grabbed their backpacks and headed toward the door.

The other girls all hugged each other before they left. My advisor gave me a pointed look and gestured toward the girl I had argued with. Her lips curled up in a small smile as she stared at me, waiting for me to give up. I reluctantly sent her a tight-lipped smile, gave her a quick, awkward hug, and headed swiftly towards the door. My moment of boldness was short-lived.

I became closer with all of those girls and was friends with them for a couple of years, but something shifted that day. Sometimes, I wish it never happened, and it shouldn’t have, but the strong emotions ignited a fire within me.

I became involved with the equity team at my predominantly white school and helped craft our Black History Month celebration. I organized an equity summit at school to discuss New York City’s unfair school admissions process we were all benefitting from.

Somehow, a day marred by hurt, pain, and anger revealed so much to me about my life, humanity, and the world. I saw how afraid the cops were of Tamir’s brown skin and nappy hair. His Blackness was a threat to our white supremacist society. Seeing the video of his death motivated me to become another voice within a movement fighting for Black people to be respected and treated as human beings.

Sometimes, I wonder if anyone else thinks back on that day. Do they remember that moment like I do, or has it become a blur among many MUN experiences? Do they remember how I wept for Tamir, or how none of them tried to comfort me afterward? Was the display of my terrifying reality simply a lesson for them, our conversation an intellectual experiment? Do they know that their words and actions left scars on my tender heart?

When I look back on what happened, it still hurts. Black trauma shouldn’t have to be channeled into something positive. Experiencing racism isn’t inspiring, and that bad memory is still just that. My pain is not a lesson for all, and neither is the murder of Tamir Rice.

Kayla Ruano-Lumpris is a junior at Brooklyn Technical High School. She is indigenous Guatemalan, Panamanian, and Afro-Caribbean, and currently resides in Harlem. She likes to go walking, play the double bass, read, bake, and write poems and stories.

A version of this piece was originally published by Youth Communication. It is reprinted here with permission.

Video sheds new light on ‘Know Justice, Know Peace’ podcast dispute

2022-10-04T23:09:03+00:00

Three weeks before a group of current and former students sued Denver Public Schools over their racial justice podcast, they met with district officials in an eighth-floor conference room at Denver Public Schools headquarters.

Video from the Aug. 29 meeting reveals a central tension in the dispute. In the meeting, district officials talk about the podcast, which the students created in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, as something akin to a class or a club. They say the podcast will expand across the district and welcome new participants as previous ones graduate.

But the founders talk about the podcast, “Know Justice, Know Peace: The Take,” as a deeply personal project born from their individual attempts to grapple with a nationwide racial reckoning — and something they want to continue to do outside of school.

“You said that we would only be able to still participate in the podcast until we graduate,” senior Dahni Austin said to Deputy Superintendent Tony Smith in the meeting. “Why, if we created the podcast way before the district got involved with the podcast, wouldn’t we be able to continue?”

“I think you would be able to continue to participate in some form or fashion,” Smith said. “But it is the position of the district that it’s the intellectual property of the district to continue on.”

Whether the podcast and its name belong to Denver Public Schools is an issue that will be settled in court. Last month, Austin and three others filed a lawsuit claiming that Colorado’s largest school district unlawfully tried to trademark “Know Justice, Know Peace: The Take.”

Viva Moffat, a University of Denver law professor who specializes in intellectual property but is not involved in the lawsuit, said the legal issues in this case are not unique.

It’s common, she said, for two entities to argue over who holds a trademark. Legally, a trademark belongs to whomever used it first “in commerce” across state lines. That means the person or business used the mark in its branding, even if they weren’t making money on it. In this case, the podcast was posted for free on YouTube.

What is unique about this case, Moffat said, are the players.

“It’s extremely unusual for there to be a trademark dispute between a school district and students in the school,” she said. “That is extremely unprecedented — and that’s probably for lots of reasons. Students aren’t often coming up with trademarkable things and then using a trademark in commerce. And it’s also uncommon for a public school district to be aggressively asserting intellectual property rights against its own students.”

While Moffat said she doesn’t know of any trademark cases involving students and schools, she said there are established copyright cases. Generally, she said, original works like podcasts are owned by the people who create them or, if they are employees of a company, by the company.

But she said there’s an exception for teachers that generally applies to students as well.

“Just because you’re in a class and you write an essay, nobody would say that DPS owns the copyright and all the papers that all of DPS’s students wrote,” Moffat said.

Meeting video sheds light on what happened before lawsuit

The video of the late August meeting sheds more light on the events that led to the lawsuit. Four students – all young Black women at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Early College high school – started the podcast in July 2020 as a way to speak out about racial injustice. They had support from then-Principal Kimberly Grayson and teacher Kiara Roberts.

The students recorded the podcast at school and were paid for their work through a district apprenticeship program. Grayson left the school this past spring, and the students weren’t sure they would continue to get paid. For that reason and others, they decided they wanted to continue their podcast independently.

“We’re not obligated to stay in a space where there’s continuous missed connection,” senior Kaliah Yizar said at the meeting, “especially when this is our job, this is our passion.”

In June, Grayson filed paperwork to form a business called Know Justice, Know Peace: The Take LLC. The students said she did so to help fulfill their wish to record the podcast independent of Denver Public Schools. But when the district learned of the LLC, it filed state and federal trademark applications for the name in early August.

On Aug. 24, a district lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter to Grayson asking that she dissolve the business and turn over the usernames and passwords for any email address or social media accounts associated with the “Know Justice, Know Peace: The Take” podcast.

The district asserted in the letter that it owned the name because the podcast was created on district property using district equipment and was supported by district employees.

But at the meeting, the students said they started the podcast over Zoom on their own computers, without any district equipment. Their lawsuit argues that they first used the name in commerce in July 2020 when they posted their first episode to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

“For DPS to say they own a creation that they were not even a part of in the beginning is crazy,” said Jenelle Nangah, who was a rising senior when the podcast started and graduated in 2021.

“‘Know Justice, Know Peace’ is our faces, who we are,” said Yizar, who was a rising sophomore in the beginning. “It’s really grimy to all of a sudden, once all of the remaining original members are seniors, once Jenelle is no longer a student of DPS, once Grayson is no longer a DPS employee, to come in and say, ‘We’ll take over now.’”

Smith, the deputy superintendent, said the district isn’t trying to hurt the podcast founders.

“Your voice is appreciated,” he told them, adding that “it’s always up to you whether or not you want to be part of how we proceed forward. The invitation is there.”

“I don’t know why you are giving us the invitation,” Nangah replied. “We should be able to give the district the invitation to take what we have created and expand it.”

District lawyer and students’ lawyer have different interpretations

Chalkbeat first requested a copy of the meeting video in early September. The district denied that request, citing a federal law that protects student privacy.

But after the students filed their lawsuit in mid-September and held a press conference, district officials allowed Chalkbeat to view a video of the meeting late last week and interview Denver Public Schools General Counsel Aaron Thompson.

Thompson said the district shared the video in part to refute a claim in the lawsuit that Smith attempted to “coerce and bully” the students into admitting that the district owns the trademark.

Thompson said Smith was soft-spoken and “comported himself very fairly.” The video shows him sitting in a relaxed posture, legs crossed, and speaking in an even tone.

Thompson said the video also shows that the podcast is district property because the students admitted they eventually used district equipment to make it and were paid for their work. Thompson said the district didn’t try to protect its property until Grayson created the LLC.

“It never was, in our view, about the girls or taking anything from the girls,” he said. “We’ve always owned it. It was only an action to stop Kim from erroneously asserting ownership.”

Thompson said it’s unfortunate that the students are caught in the middle, “but we have a responsibility to the other 90,000 students of DPS to protect the integrity of our educational programming and to expand viable educational programming for all students in the district.”

In a statement, the students’ attorney Jeffrey Kass said that the podcast founders felt that the recent meeting, which was called before they could hire a trademark lawyer, was an attempt to intimidate them and “say something without the advice of proper legal counsel.”

“DPS asked them many different ways at the meeting to agree that DPS owned the podcast and trademark,” Kass said. “Each time, the students denied.”

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Rising tide of censorship and scrutiny has schools scrambling to avoid backlash

2022-09-23T11:00:00+00:00

The culture war engulfing schools has subjected educators like Richard Clifton to unfamiliar scrutiny — including, in his case, a public records request.

In Savannah, Georgia, where Clifton is a longtime English teacher, a group of conservative activists earlier this year began calling for the school board to “purge” books with sexual content from school libraries. After Clifton took a personal stand against book banning, someone submitted a records request to learn what texts he assigns to students.

Around the same time, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed new laws that he said would protect students from what he views as obscene materials and divisive concepts. In response, an official in Clifton’s district advised against using the term “white privilege” in the classroom.

Clifton didn’t change the content of the screenwriting class he’s teaching this school year, his 29th in the district. But as the political combat around education escalates, he is more cautious about the topics he discusses and the language he uses in class.

“I am a little more gun-shy than I might have been in the past,” he said.

The conservative backlash against anti-racism and LGBTQ inclusion in schools has put intense pressure on many educators. And that is causing schools to change, in ways obvious and subtle, as laws like Georgia’s take effect across the country.

Some of the moves are public, as when districts review challenged books or make it easier for parents to lodge complaints. But other shifts are happening behind the scenes — books quietly pulled from shelves, classroom discussions cut short — as teachers and school leaders seek to avoid blowback. Often it is students of color and LGBTQ young people who feel these effects most acutely as signals of inclusivity fade or vanish.

That was the case in an Alabama school district where a superintendent, facing pressure from some parents and a new state law restricting lessons about sexuality, ordered the removal of LGBTQ pride flags from classrooms, according to a teacher who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation. As the teacher took down her flags at the request of her principal, a queer student in the room began to cry.

“Once you ban a symbol that shows you love and support them,” the teacher said, “it looks like you are no longer supporting them.”

Conservative critics view the push to confront racism and champion inclusion in schools as a pretext for exposing students to liberal ideas and inappropriate content. That backlash has fueled efforts to rein in teachers and censor books.

Three-dozen state legislatures have considered bills this year to restrict teaching about contested topics, which six states passed, while schools in nearly 140 districts have removed or limited students’ access to books that parents or community members opposed, according to two recent reports by PEN America, a free-speech advocacy group. Other legislation makes it easier for parents to see what’s taught in school and raise objections.

The combined efforts have had a chilling effect, according to analysts and educators. While there have been a few high-profile instances of districts being penalized or teachers investigated for violating the new rules, just the threat of controversy or punishment has been enough to prompt preemptive changes.

School and district leaders are “taking it upon themselves to do the censors’ work for them,” said Jeremy C. Young, senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America. “In some ways that’s the goal of the legislation: to make everyone afraid of their own shadows so they simply stay away from this material.”

The legislation, almost all of which has been introduced by Republicans, has increasingly included the threat of sanctions ranging from professional discipline to loss of state funding and even criminal charges. Some laws enlist parents as enforcers.

For instance, Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education law allows parents to report and potentially sue school districts if they believe a teacher discussed sexuality or gender identity with students in grades K-3.

“The overall feeling that I get is fear,” said Raegan Miller, a parent in St. Petersburg and member of the Florida Freedom to Read Project, which opposes the new restrictions.

The laws have unleashed a flurry of censorship, much of it aimed at books featuring Black or LGBTQ characters and driven by conservative activists. The group has tracked more than 580 titles that faced challenges across Florida over the past year, resulting in dozens of books being removed or made less accessible.

In her own children’s district, Miller has seen schools only allow older students to check out picture books with LGBTQ characters, which she considers an indirect ban. Recently, her son’s fifth-grade teacher sent home a form asking parents to indicate whether their children may use the classroom library.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever gotten a letter like that,” Miller said.

With only limited state guidance, Florida school districts have taken steps to forestall potential violations of the new laws. Some critics say they’ve gone overboard.

The Orange County school district, which educates more than 200,000 students in the Orlando area, forbade schools from adding new library books until media specialists complete a required training next year. The Miami-Dade County school board recently rejected a proposal to recognize October as “LGBTQ History Month.” And the superintendent of the more than 80,000-student Pasco County school district told employees this month to remove “Safe Space” stickers, which are meant to signal support for LGBTQ students.

“People are being very cautious,” said Dr. Sue Woltanski, a retired pediatrician and member of the Monroe County school board in Key West. “My concern is that caution will prevent people from standing up for teachers who are trying to do the right thing in their classrooms.”

Schools in her district are putting their library catalogs online in compliance with the new laws, she added, but are not removing Safe Space stickers.

Many schools’ fear of controversy or censure is surfacing in inconspicuous ways.

In Missouri, where Republican lawmakers proposed more than 20 bills this year seeking to limit what students learn about racism and other “divisive concepts,” Aimee Robertson has noticed her children’s teachers sending home more permission slips. Already this school year, her daughter’s 11th grade AP English teacher has sought parents’ consent before allowing students to choose which memoir to study or showing them a documentary about humanity’s impact on the environment.

“Clearly districts and educators are going above and beyond to cover their butts,” she said.

Students have also noticed teachers’ newfound apprehension.

Kennedy Young is an 11th grader in Georgia, where a new law limits what teachers can say about racism and U.S. history.

During a recent lesson at her school in Cobb County, Kennedy’s English teacher started to share her thoughts about why a Black and a Latina character in “A Streetcar Named Desire” weren’t given names, but she stopped herself. The teacher said students could discuss the topic, but she wasn’t allowed to participate. No one spoke up.

Kennedy, who is Black and has been helping other students talk about race under the new law, said she wanted to bring up how women of color, and Black women in particular, are often marginalized in literature. But it can be isolating for students of color to lead classroom discussions about race without teachers’ support.

“Sometimes I can feel like my voice is quieter, that it doesn’t matter,” she said, “because there isn’t that adult or other people of color to help me and guide the conversation along.”

Back in Richard Clifton’s district, Savannah-Chatham County, officials have taken steps to obey the new laws.

The school board adopted policies allowing parents to object to teaching materials used in their children’s classes, and report teachers who they believe discussed prohibited topics. At a training for administrators, a board attorney urged “caution and discretion” when using the phrase white privilege in classrooms, according to district spokesperson Sheila Blanco.

Despite pressure from activists who urged the board to “protect our children from pornography,” the district has not removed any books from school libraries this year, Blanco said.

For his part, Clifton said he believes parents have a right to know what’s taught in school, and he’s always tried to avoid promoting his personal beliefs in class. He still welcomes robust debate in his classroom, but now if a student were to raise a politically charged topic, he might think twice before engaging.

“I wouldn’t delve into it deeply,” he said, “because of the climate we are in.”

Kalyn Belsha contributed reporting.

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan to infuse curriculum with Native American history

2022-08-31T12:00:00+00:00

Starting in the 1800s, generations of Native American children across the country were taken from their homes and brought to federally funded boarding schools that banned their native languages, clothing and traditions.

Now Michigan is ensuring public school students learn the history of abuse at those boarding schools that once tried to erase Indigenous culture. They’ll also learn about the 12 federally recognized tribes in Michigan, tribal governance, economies of early civilizations, the Trail of Tears, causes of the Mexican-American War, and more.

Lawmakers infused the 2022-23 school aid budget with $750,000 to update state social studies standards and add modules about Indigenous tribal history for students in grades 8 through 12.

Michigan is among a number of states, including Idaho, North Dakota, and Wisconsin, that are beginning to bolster their curricula to include more lessons about Indigenous history that tribes say have been lacking.

The movement has grown stronger this year after the U.S. Interior Department reported that thousands of children died in the custody of Indian boarding schools that abused them, exploited their labor, and took their families’ land. That report came after the discovery of the remains of 215 children at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada.

In Michigan, the new curriculum will shift away from historical attempts to erase Indigenous histories and to perpetuate the invisibility of tribal communities in the public education system, said Jordan Shananaquet, eniigaangidoong (chairperson) of the Confederation of Michigan Tribal Education Departments.

CMTED, which includes leaders of the education departments of the state’s 12 federally recognized tribes, is partnering with the Michigan Department of Education to develop the curriculum and prepare educators to teach it.

The standards will ensure middle and high school students learn about the history, culture, and contributions of tribal nations, state Superintendent Michael Rice said.

The Michigan Department of Education has been prioritizing Indigenous education by, for example, launching an Indigenous Education Initiative, highlighting the work of Indigenous educators, and offering professional development on teaching about First Peoples.

That’s refreshing to April Lindala, a professor in Northern Michigan University’s Center for Native American Studies, where she teaches a course on the history of Indian boarding schools.

Students are graduating from Michigan high schools knowing surprisingly little about Indigenous history, particularly the boarding schools, five of which were in Michigan, she said.

“There are some who know nothing at all, or what they do know is so limited that they don’t understand the consequence of what was happening at the time or the intergenerational consequences of how that past affects communities today,” Lindala said.

Schools across the country have been moving toward more complete versions of history. In some places, the shift has given rise to pushback from parents and others who argue that “woke” educators are indoctrinating students with anti-American attitudes by, for instance, teaching that racism was baked into the nation’s founding documents, or that Christopher Columbus should be shunned as a colonizer rather than celebrated as a discoverer.

“We’re just talking about what actually happened to people,” said Shananaquet, of the tribal education group. “We have to sit with the not-so-great aspects of our history and understand that, because it influences the present, too. We’re trying to teach the multitude of histories and stop painting a historical narrative that is only happy and good. That’s not real.”

Understanding history also helps people understand the present, she said.

Native Americans “are not trapped in amber,” Shananaquet said. “We are living, breathing, evolving people. This is who we were, this is what happened to us, and this is who we are now. … We are a thriving people who have our own culture, our own languages, our own histories that were tried to be destroyed, and we’re still here.”

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

Half of Black parents want schools to spend more time tackling racism, poll finds

2022-08-16T04:04:00+00:00

Nearly two-thirds of parents say that their child’s school places an appropriate emphasis on slavery, racism, and discrimination against Black people, according to a new poll.

But one group stands out as least likely to approve of schools’ approach: Black parents, half of whom wanted more emphasis on these topics.

The data suggests that Republican-led efforts to limit schools’ focus on race and racism — despite being done under the banner of parental rights — may represent the views of a minority of parents. Or perhaps these efforts have already assuaged conservative parents’ concerns, but prompted new concern from Black families.

Either way, the results underscore considerable discontent among Black parents about how schools are approaching topics related to race and racism.

“Parents of Black students are more likely to say that schools should be emphasizing these issues,” said David Houston, an education researcher at George Mason University.

The survey, conducted in May and released this week by Education Next, asked a nationally representative group of parents about an array of education issues.

Sixty-four percent said their child’s school places “about the right amount” of emphasis “on slavery, racism, and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States.” Eleven percent said there was too much emphasis on these topics, while 25% said too little.

This was striking and somewhat surprising, said Houston, who co-authored the survey.

“That’s a large majority of parents saying their child’s school is handling this appropriately,” he said. “It’s a minority that says otherwise.”

This pattern applied across different groups of parents — school type, child’s grade level, and even partisanship. Sixty-nine percent of Republican parents said their child’s school placed an appropriate emphasis on race and racism.

Beyond issues related to race, the vast majority of parents — 86% — were at least somewhat satisfied with their child’s school more generally.

But when when it comes to addressing race and racism, there was more discontent among Black parents, 49% of whom wanted more focus on racism and slavery in their child’s school. An additional 47% said schools struck the right balance.

Tearsa Thomas, a parent from Baltimore who is Black, said that the schools her three sons have attended in the city spent a significant — and appropriate — amount of time discussing racism and its impacts.

“As young people here in the United States, it’s one thing to learn about something from the past, but to be able to understand how it connects to their present is important,” she said. “It’s part of the school’s responsibility.”

If anything she would have liked more focus on how racism directly affects her children personally and how to address and mitigate it.

Thomas also never got the impression that teachers were pushing their own political views on her children. “They were given room to speak freely about their perspective,” she said.

Education Next’s results are somewhat surprising in light of the fact that many schools and states have faced high-profile pressure from parents and community members who say schools have spent too much time on race-focused equity efforts, often derided as “critical race theory.” These critics say that many schools have incorporated race in a way that is not age appropriate, unfairly categorizes children by their skin color, and overstates the impact of racism in American society and history.

Parents who have this frustration may be in the minority — but they also may be the most motivated, organized, and listened to. National conservative think tanks and media outlets have supported and elevated this perspective.

The poll results might also be explained by the fact that some of the backlash is coming from people who don’t have children in local public schools or from parents who are concerned about schools other than their own children’s. For instance, a Chalkbeat analysis found that only a third of complaints about elementary school books in one Tennessee district came from parents with young children in the local public schools.

Notably, rates of dissatisfaction with schools’ approach to racism appear much higher among the general public than among parents. According to the Education Next poll, 35% of all Americans say local public schools don’t place enough emphasis on racism, while 27% say there is too much much emphasis. Here, there were much sharper partisan divides.

“The partisan debate is a debate among the public. It is not really a debate among parents,” said Houston.

Some conservative critiques may be resonating with the broader public, though, as Republicans have eroded Democrats’ long-standing advantage on education issues.

Efforts to limit the emphasis on race in schools — which have produced a flurry of laws in red states — already appear to be impacting what’s taught in classrooms. One in four teachers say they have been told to limit discussion of hot-button political topics, including race, according to a recent survey.

That may have reduced some parents’ dissatisfaction with the approach of their child’s school, while increasing concerns among Black families and Democrats. Republican parents in red states had higher levels of satisfaction with schools’ approach than those in blue states. But Democratic parents in red states were especially likely to say they wanted more emphasis on race and racism.

Finally, the wording of the Education Next survey question — particularly the mention of slavery — may have led fewer parents to express dissatisfaction than a question about present-day racism. There appears to be more widespread support for schools discussing racism as a historical matter than as an issue that still remains.

“We struggled with coming up with the right form of this question,” said Houston

But the results are at least somewhat in line with other polling. An NPR poll from April found that only 19% of parents said their child’s school taught about race and racism in a way that was inconsistent with their values, although a large number didn’t have a firm opinion either way.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Chilling effect: 1 in 4 teachers told to limit class talk on hot-button issues

2022-08-10T11:00:00+00:00

Soon after a wave of states moved to restrict lessons on topics like racism and sexism, reports of stifled classroom discussions began to surface.

But it was unclear just how common that experience was until now. In a new nationally representative survey, 1 in 4 teachers said they were told by school or district leaders to limit their classroom conversations about political and social issues.

A higher share of teachers, nearly 1 in 3, said they’d gotten those orders while working in a state with an official restriction on teaching about racism, sexism, or other contentious topics. But teachers in states without official policies also felt that pressure: Just over 1 in 5 said they’d been told to limit their classroom discussions, too.

The survey, released on Wednesday by the RAND Corporation, represents one of the best summations to date of how early efforts to restrict teaching about racism and sexism have affected schools and reshaped classroom conversations.

The survey is based on responses from nearly 2,400 K-12 teachers earlier this year, when 14 states had laws or official policies limiting how schools can teach about race, racism, or other forms of bias. Since then, three more states have added similar restrictions, according to a tracker maintained by Education Week, and others are still considering them.

This school year, as new laws or policies take effect, more teachers will be figuring out how to navigate these restrictions for the first time.

In Kentucky, for example, a law passed in April prohibits schools from teaching that an individual bears responsibility for actions committed by other members of their race or sex — a provision that’s limited conversations elsewhere about white and male privilege. The law also says it’s “destructive to the unification of our nation” to teach that racial disparities are based “solely” in the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws, a provision some worry will make it harder for teachers to draw connections between past and present forms of discrimination.

Sara Green, who teaches eighth grade social studies in Kentucky’s Fayette County schools and sits on the state’s teachers advisory council, says she and other social studies teachers are worried they’ll be more scrutinized this year after seeing what happened in other states that passed similar laws.

Her class spans the colonization of North America to Reconstruction — subjects that hit on lots of “racism, sexism and other ‘isms,’” Green said. Her students often have many questions and debates about whether Reconstruction was a success or a failure, and why Abraham Lincoln advocated for the end of slavery, but didn’t believe in racial equality.

“We are worried about being able to present the information that we have been trained to present,” she said, “and then possibly facing backlash from the public or from parents. That definitely is a concern.”

While plenty of teachers across the country say they haven’t changed their lessons, these restrictions have had a chilling effect.

Last school year, teachers reported cutting short conversations with students about slavery and the genocide of Native Americans because of new state restrictions. Some educators avoided using phrases like “systemic racism,” or skipped over PowerPoint slides about the fight for gay rights. As legislation worked its way through the Iowa statehouse, education officials there scrapped an equity conference designed to help teachers better support students of color.

RAND researchers heard echoes of that in their interviews with teachers. Some said they weren’t allowed to add more voices of color to their lessons, while others said they had to check their lessons against district policies or state laws for compliance. Sometimes parents put pressure on school leaders that filtered down to classrooms.

“I have had parents come in and say, ‘If this is what you’re going to teach, my student doesn’t need to know about this,’” one teacher told the RAND researchers. The teacher recalled their principal’s response was: “I don’t really think this is a good topic.”

That pressure isn’t being applied everywhere. The survey found that teachers of color who worked mostly with other teachers of color or with students of color were less likely to say they’d been told to limit their classroom conversations, suggesting their schools and the families they serve are more supportive of classroom conversations about race, racism, and bias, the researchers wrote.

When teachers are told to limit their classroom discussions about certain politicized topics, it seems to make those tricky conversations even harder to have.

The survey found that 38% of teachers who had no official limitations on what they could talk about in class felt like they hadn’t gotten enough guidance on how to have conversations about hot-button political and social issues. But a higher share of the teachers who did have to navigate restrictions — 56% — felt like they’d gotten insufficient guidance to have those conversations with their students.

“This finding suggests that teachers may not clearly understand what is or is not allowed or how to carry out instruction within the confines of these directives,” the RAND researchers wrote.

Social studies and English teachers, who are most likely to touch on these issues in class, are especially in need of better guidance about how to follow new policies or laws, the researchers said.

In several cases, when states have passed laws restricting lessons on racism, sexism, or other forms of bias, teachers have gotten little guidance on how to follow those rules. That trend has only continued.

Mississippi lawmakers, for example, passed a law in March that says schools can’t teach that any sex, race, or nationality is “inherently superior or inferior” — again a provision that can limit conversations about white privilege. Schools also can’t “make a distinction or classification” of students based on race.

Teachers and civil rights groups wanted to know how the law would be enforced, since schools that violate the provisions risk losing state funding. “The biggest fear we have is that it’s going to impact how teachers teach and how school districts embrace diversity and issues dealing with civil rights or Black history in Mississippi,” Jarvis Dortch, the head of Mississippi’s chapter of the ACLU, told Mississippi Today earlier this year.

But state education officials haven’t put out any guidance about how to follow the law, and they don’t plan to. That’s because they believe the requirements “are compatible with existing academic standards and expectations for Mississippi public schools,” Jean Gordon Cook, a spokesperson for the Mississippi education department, wrote in an email.

Kentucky issued some guidance about its new law, but it includes almost nothing about how to put the law into practice in the classroom.

Teachers from across Kentucky have been working over the last few months to adjust the state’s social studies standards to comply with another part of the new law that requires schools to incorporate 24 documents and speeches into their middle and high school lessons by July 2023.

Green and other Kentucky teachers already taught many of those documents, such as the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution, but other selections, like a speech by Ronald Reagan, raised questions. Green and others wondered why it constituted a “fundamental” American document, noting that the list doesn’t have any texts by Black women or Latino authors.

As those 24 documents get woven into the state standards, Green says she’d like more guidance on when and how the texts should be taught, and how deeply students should dive into them at various grade levels.

But the law also is presenting Green with a new teachable moment: When she covers required texts in her lessons, she can talk with her students about how they became part of the law and why.

“We oftentimes look at laws that differ from state to state,” she said. “The kids are interested in things like that. I don’t think there is anything wrong with letting them know: This is how this came about. What do you think about it?”

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Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

These Indiana schools made racial equity their mission. Now they face hostile legislation.

2022-06-13T12:00:00+00:00

At Bethel Park Elementary in Indianapolis, a fourth- and fifth-grade book club pauses in a read-aloud to discuss this line in “The Hate U Give”:

Funny how it works with white kids though. It’s dope to be black until it’s hard to be black.

“Black people can’t really do stuff like white people can,” a student says.

Eight students sit around a table, almost all of them Black — a reflection of the older grades at the small elementary school. The student grows shy when the teacher asks him to elaborate. A classmate chimes in: “Black people don’t have as much privilege as white people sometimes.”

“Ah, privilege,” teacher Treasure Jones says, underscoring a term that some politicians would rather she didn’t.

Five miles away from the school, lawmakers at the Indiana Statehouse spent months this year debating censoring lessons like these, which deal with racial identity and racism, deeming them “divisive.” Republican leaders, falling in line with the conservative movement across the country, didn’t want teachers to discuss Black Lives Matter, institutional racism, white privilege, or unconscious bias.

Those politicians were fighting on behalf of a vocal contingent of parents in mostly white suburban districts who protest against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts out of concern that they unfairly malign white people. They often say they’re trying to ban critical race theory, an academic concept taught in law schools that examines how racism is embedded in society and government.

But for racially diverse schools such as Bethel Park, the legislative battles threaten to interrupt years of work to better serve marginalized students. Proposed laws sought to prohibit racial equity training for teachers, which highlights how systemic racism persists and shows teachers how to recognize their own biases. Educators devoted to this work fear that silencing conversations on race could whitewash lessons and alienate students of color.

The stakes are high: Many Indianapolis schools believe more inclusive lessons and intensive training are vital to closing academic gaps between students of different races. Nearly three-quarters of students across Indianapolis’ 11 districts and dozens of charter schools are Black, Latino, or other students of color.

“We’re not in a position to have leaders or educators opt out of culturally responsive practices,” said Erica Buchanan-Rivera, Director of Equity and Inclusion for Washington Township Schools. “We own that we have disparities to address.”

Ultimately, Indiana lawmakers dropped this year’s attempt to pass curriculum restrictions after a series of Republican stumbles. But many educators are bracing for another legislative battle next year and expect to see the issue rear up during upcoming school board elections.

School officials and education advocates say that puts the racial equity work in Indianapolis schools front and center, underscoring the need for policymakers to better understand the priorities, progress, and challenges at city schools.

“When we look at who is centered in these conversations around this anti-CRT legislation, it’s white children,” said Tambra Jackson, dean of education at IUPUI and professor of urban education. “We are not talking about the most vulnerable children.”

***

Indianapolis Public Schools has publicly acknowledged its role in perpetuating systemic inequities in the past — and pledged to change practices that contribute to racial disparities.

In Indianapolis schools, the racial equity movement has undergone a decades-long evolution.

Patricia Payne remembers walking into her first Indianapolis Public Schools classroom 60 years ago, a Black teacher for Black students in a segregated school system.

“The first thing I noticed was the textbooks and the resources did not reflect the students except the chapter on slavery,” said Payne, now IPS’ racial equity director.

Over the years, the 31,000-student district made strides such as resolving to teach Black history, creating a multicultural office, and adding racial equity training for educators.

The racial gaps in student outcomes illuminate the need for schools to make sure their teaching practices aren’t just equal, but equitable — meaning they help all students reach the same levels of success.

In Indiana, just 8% of Black students pass both math and English standardized tests. They are less likely to graduate than their white peers, less likely to have access to advanced courses, and more likely to face suspensions.

In 2020, IPS made a big statement. The district, which serves about 80% students of color, publicly acknowledged its role in perpetuating systemic inequities in the past — and pledged to change practices that contribute to racial disparities.

IPS called it Board Policy 1619, in a nod to The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which reframes U.S. history by centering the legacy of American slavery, beginning the year enslaved Africans first arrived in the English colony.

At the same time, the board put forward a forceful Black Lives Matter statement: “To believe that Black lives matter — and to put that belief into action,” it reads in part, “means to commit ourselves to a radical refusal to give up on any student, to hand them over to a criminal justice system that doesn’t share our values, or return them to communities that lack the resources to support the realization of their fullest potential.”

What does that look like in schools?

School officials have to consider how each decision — large or small — can affect children differently, advocates say. Where are magnet programs located? Who’s affected by transportation cuts? Which students are affected the most by out-of-school suspensions?

Buchanan-Rivera, Washington Township’s equity director, looks to teachers and leaders to reach these goals. The northside district has a steep hill to climb: Out of the 11 Indianapolis districts, Washington Township Schools faces the widest disparity in test scores between Black and white students — a 44 percentage point gap in ILEARN passing rates.

Educators have to be willing to overhaul what they’re doing and question flaws in school systems. Buchanan-Rivera calls it “mirror work,” because educators must “look into the mirror to reflect on their own practices and how they are showing up for children.”

“We all know it’s easier to point the finger to societal factors,” she said, “rather than to talk about the harmful or ineffective practices occurring within schools.”

***

Shawanda Tyson, pictured with her son Marell, is among the Stand for Children Indiana parents who advocate for more equitable policies in IPS.

IPS and Washington Township were two of the districts that spoke out against Indiana’s anti-CRT legislation.

Lawmakers’ attempt to ban discussions on racism seemed like “a bad solution in search of a non-existent problem in our state and community,” IPS board members said in a statement.

Washington Township officials said they “stand against censoring the truth of our history and the lived experiences of students.”

Among the effects of the proposed legislation was that it would have stopped districts from training teachers to recognize what racism looks like in schools, including how trying to be “color-blind” ignores the past and present realities of racial oppression.

“In our mind’s eye, if you do not teach children the truth, then they will not be able to make sense of their world,” Payne said. “And we’re not just talking about teaching the truth to Black and brown children, we’re talking about teaching the truth to all children.”

IPS fell under conservative crosshairs last year when a former teacher said schools lie about not teaching critical race theory because it’s embedded in teaching approaches. IPS fired the teacher in January for several violations of ethics and conduct policies.

Still, unlike in suburban districts, where parents have protested at school board meetings against racial equity efforts they consider divisive, IPS sees broad support among families for creating more inclusive classrooms.

If anything, much of the pushback IPS deals with comes from people advocating for bolder steps to address inequities.

IPS parents, for example, have been flocking board meetings to push for better policies for Black and Latino students. Last month, a handful of parents asked board members for data on which schools serve Black and Latino students best, to take into consideration as the district plans a reorganization that could close schools.

“It’s on the district to make a model and to grow our schools that work better for our Black and brown children,” said Shawanda Tyson, a parent advocate with Stand for Children Indiana. One of Tyson’s children attended a school that is closing this year due to poor academic results, and another is thriving at a charter school outside of IPS.

She’s advocated for racial equity training, among other systemic changes. Parents, Tyson believes, all want the same thing: “We just want children to have the same high-quality education, and it shouldn’t come at the cost of where we live or income or money.”

***

A handful of fourth- and fifth-grade students at Bethel Park read “The Hate U Give” as part of the school’s focus on exploring identity.

While this year’s legislative debates often focused on history lessons, teachers also worry about being silenced on current racial injustices — especially when their students are hungry for those conversations.

At Bethel Park Elementary, students have been talking about gun violence and police brutality while studying “The Hate U Give.”

The novel by Angie Thomas, which centers on a police shooting of an unarmed Black boy, was briefly banned by a Texas school district. Police also challenged the book in a South Carolina district.

Bethel Park formed a lunchtime book club with 10 fourth- and fifth-graders whose parents gave permission for them to read “The Hate U Give.” At the 200-student charter school, everyone in those grades is a student of color, and 85% of the overall student body is Black, Latino, multiracial, or Native American.

Bethel Park educators believe students will be more engaged and better positioned to succeed when they feel heard and see themselves represented in the curriculum. The school weaves social identity into its lessons so students can explore their histories and cultures — and that of others, too.

“We come from a variety of different places, and if we’re going to teach one perspective all the time, many of my children are not going to be able to see themselves in the curriculum,” Jones said. “They’re not going to be able to see themselves as writers. They’re not going to be able to see themselves as teachers, even, and all these other beautiful, diverse careers.”

One day this spring, the book club students brought their lunches from the cafeteria to a conference room, opening their books and skipping over the curse words as they read aloud.

At the beginning of the book, Starr, the Black teenage main character, leaves a party when gunshots go off. A police officer pulls over the car she’s riding in, barking orders at her best friend, Khalil.

When Khalil checks on Starr, the officer opens fire.

Pow! Pow! Pow!

In the book, Khalil falls to the ground.

In the Bethel Park conference room, the book club goes silent.

One student says Khalil should have followed the officer’s instructions. Another says the officer could have said, “Put your hands up” and didn’t need to shoot Khalil. They talk about how the officer probably felt afraid, then wondered where that fear came from.

Jones invited a local police officer to talk to students and answer their questions. She tells the students about how the killing of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy playing with a toy gun who was shot by police in 2014, shook her and shaped the way she went through her college studies.

Before the lunch group ends, Jones asks how they feel. A couple of students say they feel scared and sad, that something like this could happen to them or their families.

“If you are scared of how society is right now, or how we live right now, you have a voice, right?” Jones said. “And you can use that to make…”

“A better place, like Martin Luther King!” one student chimes in.

“We just need to figure out how to do that, right?” Jones says. “And we have to build relationships so that people will be inclined to listen to us.”

Kae Petrin contributed to this story.

Stephanie Wang covers education in Indiana, including pre-K, K-12 schools, and higher education. Contact Stephanie at swang@chalkbeat.org.

Diverse books remind readers that their stories matter. Why are schools trying to ban so many of them?

2022-06-09T12:00:00+00:00

I still remember the time in elementary school when my mom and I were sorting books on my bookshelf. We would choose which ones to keep and which to give away so we could make room for new ones.

Sometimes, my mom would place books that I had put in the giveaway pile back on my shelves — books like “Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters,” “Amazing Grace,” and “Lily Brown’s Paintings.” When I asked her why, she said she didn’t remember having picture books with Black characters when she was a kid and wanted me to make sure my library always had books with characters who looked like me.

Elena Recinto

Ever since then, I sometimes have trouble trading out books with Black and Asian characters because those are the books I sometimes relate to the most.

When I was 9, I started Elena Reads, a blog to share my love of reading with others and introduce people to diverse books they might not have known existed. For example, on my blog, I reviewed “Loretta Little Looks Back” by Andrea Davis Pinkney (about a Black family living when slavery and segregation were legal) and “The War That Saved My Life” by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley (about a girl who has a disability and faces abuse). I want to make sure these books are accessible to everyone.

From a young age, I’ve loved books. Sometimes, reading gives me the feeling of escaping this world and going into another one. I love playing the scenes of the story in my head. It’s like a movie, but better. I also love that reading teaches me about people who are different from me. So it is really confusing when I hear about books I love that are on banned books lists because they discuss racism or have gay characters, for instance.

Why would parents and educators want to take amazing books with diverse characters out of schools and off library shelves?

Jerry Craft’s Newberry award-winning “New Kid,” a funny graphic novel about a Black boy attending a mostly white middle school, tackles racism and stereotypes, and it shows how hurtful they can be. I can’t understand why a school district in Texas banned this book, which is based on the author’s life.

When I interviewed Craft recently, he told me he didn’t really get why people were so upset about his book. He said one parent didn’t like how the white characters were depicted and worried that it would make her white child feel bad about real things happening in the world. He said if that parent had taken the time to read the book, she would have seen that many of the white characters aren’t depicted as bad or evil. And, when complaining parents say that everyone is “equal,” they dismiss injustices and experiences that happened to many people of color, the LGBTQ community, and those with disabilities.

It’s particularly upsetting to see diverse books banned because it makes it harder for students who are Black and brown or who are gay to see themselves in what they are reading. When we read about characters whose experiences correlate with our own, it makes us realize that our stories matter. And these books also help other readers open their eyes to people who are different from them.

It is really confusing when I hear about books I love that are on banned books lists because they discuss racism or have gay characters.

For example, I think kids can learn about what it is like to be an immigrant family in this country if they read “Front Desk,” by the award-winning author Kelly Yang. It is a story about a Chinese family who immigrates to America. The book details their lives here and how they struggle, like when the main character is bullied because she is Asian. This is another book that some school districts have banned for being “racially divisive.” When Yang heard about one such ban in a small Long Island district, she tweeted that she was “heartbroken,” writing: “Books about the immigrant experience are valid. Books about POC are valid. We are valid!”

A book I read in English class, “Mexican WhiteBoy” by Matt De La Pena, also appears on some schools’ banned books lists. It is about a biracial teen named Danny who finds his identity through baseball and family. Those who oppose teaching the book say it promotes “critical race theory,” and white students might feel uncomfortable reading it.

But it works both ways. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable for Black students to read about race. When my mom and I read “Addy” books from the American Girl series, I learned about slavery for the first time. Reading about it made me really uneasy. I was a little sad and scared, but my mom and I had conversations after every chapter, and I became more educated about racism.

This could be the answer to banning books: open conversations with parents, teachers, and others about what is being read. If we do this, we will become more understanding of what we are reading and each other, even if it is hard and uncomfortable at first.

Elena Recinto is a Michigan middle school student who reviews diverse children’s books on her blog, Elena Reads. She would like to be an author one day. She usually has her nose in a book, but she has many other interests. She runs cross country, plays piano and violin, and recently played Charlie Bucket in her school musical, Willy Wonka Jr.

Newark schools’ new curriculum highlights African American history. What’s in it?

2022-05-12T17:39:18+00:00

Newark schools have a new history curriculum. It has a long history of its own.

The school district’s new curriculum includes lessons for every grade level about the contributions — and oppression — of Black people and other marginalized groups in America. Students will learn about ancient Africa, the enslavement of African people in the United States, the long struggle for civil rights, and much more.

For decades, Newark community members have called for schools to thoroughly teach African American history; in the late 1960s, some Newark students even staged a school boycott in part to demand that officials add “Negro history” to the curriculum. In 2002, New Jersey adopted the Amistad law, which required schools to teach African American history. But many districts failed to abide by the new rule.

“Amistad is written in the legislation,” Newark Superintendent Roger León said in 2019, “but if you try to find it in any of our curriculum, it is absent.”

León has set out to change that. In 2020, the district rolled out a new curriculum — essentially teaching guides — for grades K-5 that combines social studies and English language arts and puts Black, Hispanic, and indigenous people center stage. And, after teachers wrote then rewrote a new history curriculum for grades 6-11, the district finally introduced it in schools last fall.

Officials say the goal of the new materials is to ensure that students learn accurate accounts of American and world history — not sanitized or Eurocentric versions.

“Those histories marginalized people,” said Carynne Conover, the district’s social studies director, during a recent presentation. “We’re just putting them back in.”

Newark has undertaken this work at a time when some states are trying to restrict what students learn about America’s past. Republican lawmakers in at least 36 states have sought to limit certain classroom discussions about race and racism, which conservatives have dubbed “critical race theory.”

“In this district, we are pioneers,” Newark school board member Asia Norton said in October, during a discussion about the new curriculum. “We didn’t need someone to talk about critical race theory for us to do this work.”

District officials discussed the new curriculum during a recent online “community roundtable.”

But even as board members tout the curriculum, few parents or community members know what’s in it. The rollout of the new materials, which some teachers say was rushed, was done with little fanfare. The district hasn’t made the documents easily accessible, and did not invite community members to speak during an online “community roundtable” last month about the curriculum.

District officials did not respond to questions for this article.

Nadirah Brown, whose daughter attends Harriet Tubman School, said she had no idea schools had adopted a new history curriculum.

“This is news to me — and I attend all the PTA meetings,” she said. “I can’t tell you what is being taught.”

So what is this curriculum and how is it working out in schools? Chalkbeat’s guide has the answers.

What is the new curriculum?

Curriculum here means a collection of materials that shape what students learn.

Mainly intended for teachers, the materials include weeks-long “units of study,” daily lesson plans, readings, discussion prompts, and learning goals and activities. They cover social studies and English in grades K-5, and U.S. history, world history, and geography in grades 6-11.

The cover of a new first grade “unit of study” that combines English and social studies.

Here are some examples of the lower-grade teaching units..

Grade 1: “Learning About Africa & African Culture,” a four-week unit about the countries and cultures of Africa.
Grade 2: “The Science of Skin Color and Colorism,” a three-week unit about the biological processes that produce skin tones and the concept of “colorism,” coined by writer Alice Walker to describe prejudice against people of the same race based on their skin color.
Grade 4: “Life After 1492: Native American Assimilation, Human Rights, and Genocide,” a five-week unit about the history of Native Americans after Christopher Columbus’ arrival, including natives’ forced assimilation and their ongoing fight to protect their rights and traditions.
Grade 5: “Initiating Change: Boycotts, Marches, Sit-Ins and Strikes,” a four-week unit about the movements in the U.S. in the 1950s and 60s for African American, Latino, and workers rights, led by Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, and others.

Here are some examples of units from the grades 6-11 materials, which include “compelling questions” to guide student thinking.

“Early African Civilizations: Did Ancient Africa depend on Europeans to become civilized?”
“Emerging Global Economy: What happens when cultures collide?”
“World War II: Does the end justify the means?”

New units of study listed in a Newark school district newsletter in March 2022.

In addition to the district-created materials, the board also approved new social studies textbooks last August. Harcourt Mifflin Houghton, a Boston-based education publisher, will provide the books under a one-year, $1.75 million contract.

Who made it?

Newark educators created most of the new materials.

Thirty district teachers and 16 administrators convened last summer to write the social studies curriculum for grades 6-11, which includes 68 different units, Conover said in her April presentation. The materials are intended to meet the mandate of the Amistad law, as well as other New Jersey laws requiring students to learn about the societal contributions of LGBTQ Americans, people with disabilities, and Asian Americans, Conover added.

A unit from the new fourth grade curriculum adopted by Newark Public Schools.

The new materials, which teachers started using this school year, are actually the district’s second attempt to create an Amistad-compliant curriculum for the upper grades. A group of educators wrote such a curriculum in 2020, but Conover, who was not involved in that process, decided to try again.

“She felt the curriculum wasn’t as in depth as she had hoped,” said Yvette Jordan, a high school history teacher who helped write the 2020 curriculum for the upper grades but was pleased with the revised version. “I think she and the teachers did a phenomenal job.”

A series of lessons for fifth graders in Newark Public Schools.

District educators and staffers also wrote the K-5 curriculum.

It intentionally features books written by and about people of color, said Mary Ann Reilly, the district’s assistant superintendent in charge of teaching and learning, during a talk in 2020 hosted by Rutgers University-Newark. When students see their own cultures and ancestors reflected in the curriculum, that captivates their interest and enhances learning, Reilly said.

“This is a major lever for student achievement,” she said, adding that “the community has been asking and wanting us” to more deeply embed African American history in the curriculum.

Where can you find it?

It isn’t easy.

The district website includes a “Curriculum Resources” page, which has a separate curriculum section. However, the social studies materials only include grades 6-12 and appear to be outdated; they don’t feature the newly adopted teaching guides. A separate Amistad section is labeled “Under Construction,” and also does not include the new materials.

The Newark school board uploaded some, but not all, of the materials to its online agenda when the board approved them in 2020 and 2021 — but parents and members of the public must search through two years of agendas to find them.

The lack of curriculum transparency is not limited to Newark — other New Jersey districts also make it difficult or impossible for the public to review the documents that dictate what students learn.

In response to recent controversy about sex education, the state Senate’s education committee advanced a bill on Monday that would require districts to post their health curriculums online. Sen. Vin Gopal, the committee chair, said a forthcoming bill will extend that requirement to other subjects.

What are people saying about it?

The curriculum has received some favorable reviews.

Charles Payne, an African American studies professor at Rutgers University-Newark and an expert on school reform, gave the K-5 materials high marks during the university event in 2020.

“One of the biggest things for improving districts is high-quality curriculum and teaching,” he said. “This curriculum looks high quality to me.”

Other people have expressed concerns. Wilhelmina Holder, a longtime Newark activist who died this month, said the K-5 curriculum materials she reviewed in 2020 were “terrible” and “did not live up to the letter of the [Amistad] law.” She said district officials were receptive to her feedback, but did not show her any subsequent revisions.

In September, the district hired a local historian, Junius Williams, to help develop additional K-5 materials. He told Chalkbeat that the district also asked him to review the teacher-created curriculum.

Other criticism has focused on the district’s rollout of the curriculum. Teachers said the new textbooks did not arrive at schools until late September — after classes had already begun. One high school teacher said the curriculum provides lesson overviews, but teachers still must create their own worksheets and assessments.

Another teacher said the district didn’t give educators enough time to get acquainted with the new curriculum.

“Nobody liked how it was rolled out at the beginning of the year,” said the teacher, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation. “It shouldn’t have been rushed in — particularly coming off a COVID year of chaos.”

Bashir Muhammad Ptah Akinyele, a longtime history and Africana studies teacher at Weequachic High School.

Yet other teachers said the curriculum is worth celebrating, even if it leaves room for improvement.

“Although the Amistad curriculum is not perfect, it has opened up our classrooms to factual and balanced instruction in history,” said Bashir Muhammad Ptah Akinyele, a longtime history and Africana studies teacher at Weequachic High School.

Nadirah Brown’s daughter, Kareenah, said she learns about historical and current events in her seventh grade social studies class through news articles and the new textbook. Kareenah said the class has studied famous figures, such as her school’s namesake, Harriet Tubman, but has not gone as deep into African American history as she would like.

“It feels like I’m just getting retaught what I already know,” she said.

What’s next?

More materials are on the way.

Conover, the social studies director, said her team is working on assessments for the new curriculum, as well as a freestanding social studies curriculum for grades 4-5 — a shift from those created before she arrived that combined social studies and English.

They also have created teaching guides for seven Advanced Placement social studies courses to be offered next school year, and are developing survey courses for high schoolers on African American, Latino, and Caribbean history, Conover said.

Her team also is exploring the creation of high school elective courses focused on topics such as the roots of inequality in the U.S., the politics of conservatism, and the history of Black women in music.

This summer, the educators who wrote the grades 6-11 curriculum will work on improving it.

“Like the U.S. Constitution, curriculum is a living document,” Conover wrote in a district newsletter. “It requires space to change and expand.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city and across New Jersey. Contact Patrick at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

How the age-appropriate debate is altering curriculum in Tennessee and nationwide

2022-05-05T12:00:00+00:00

‘Age-appropriate’ books, history, and CRT: What you need to know about the Tennessee curriculum debate

2022-05-05T12:00:00+00:00

Officials nationwide have raced to enact new laws and introduce new policies meant to shape how students learn and discuss history. Many of these efforts have attempted to ban critical race theory, an academic framework primarily taught at the college level that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism.

Tennessee was among the first states to enact a law intended to restrict K-12 classroom discussions about the legacy of slavery, racism, and white privilege. This year, book challenges and bans increased as Tennessee lawmakers debated several bills aimed at pulling titles from school library shelves.

Now, Tennessee students may soon learn more about Black history, following the recent passage of a bill that requires schools to infuse multiculturalism throughout the K-12 curriculum, with special attention to Black history in grades five through eight.

Here is everything you need to know about the Tennessee curriculum debate up to this point — and what may be on the horizon.

How we got here: CRT and Tennessee’s curriculum debate

How the age-appropriate debate is altering curriculum in Tennessee and nationwide

“Front and center are concerns about the age-appropriateness of curriculum and instruction designed to introduce painful truths about America’s origins and present-day injustices. Truths, which some parents feel are at odds with a redeeming and inspirational national narrative, and which others say must be shared early if America hopes to ever achieve racial reconciliation.”

CRT and book bans in Tennessee schools

“Across the country, new laws targeting critical race theory and debated books are influencing the small but pivotal decisions educators make every day: how to answer a student’s question, what texts to read as a class, and how to prepare for a lesson.”

CRT Map: Efforts to restrict teaching racism and bias have multiplied across the U.S.

Chalkbeat tracked efforts to restrict — and expand — education on racism, bias, the contributions of specific racial or ethnic groups to U.S. history, or related topics. This is a screenshot of one of the maps on Feb. 1, 2022.

“In some states, lawmakers have tried to restrict antiracism training or the teaching of what they call ‘divisive concepts.’ But on the opposite end, other states are adding ethnic studies courses or incorporating more about people of color into their learning standards.

Tennessee nails down rules for disciplining teachers, withholding money from schools that teach banned concepts about racism

A picture of a teacher grading papers.

“Tennessee has bolstered the financial penalties against large school districts that violate the state’s new law regulating discussions on race and gender in the classroom.”

Protesters confront Tennessee education commissioner over claims of critical race theory in curriculum

“The protest brought together parents and grandparents in rural and suburban Sumner County. Organizers promoted the gathering on social media and via email through notices that mentioned critical race theory and invited people to ‘protest the indoctrination of our kids.’ ”

How Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project ignited the critical race theory backlash

“To chronicle how Hannah-Jones’ work and tenure controversy contributed to this transformational moment in history education and educational policy, Chalkbeat has created a timeline of key events.”

Legal scholars question Tennessee’s new bill restricting how educators teach about racial injustice

At Tindley Summit Academy in Indianapolis, a hallway display shows pictures of Black people killed by police to prompt conversations about racism and racial injustice.

“Legal scholars are questioning whether a recently passed bill that seeks to restrict Tennessee educators’ teachings about race and racism will pass legal muster given past precedent, including one case that dates back 50 years.”

The Tennessee legislature: How lawmakers have played a role in the CRT and curriculum discussion

Tennessee is close to becoming the next state to require Black History education

“Tennessee students may soon learn more about Black history, following the recent passage of a bill that requires schools to infuse multiculturalism throughout the K-12 curriculum, with special attention to Black history in grades 5 through 8.”

After book burning comment, Tennessee lawmakers vote to let state veto library materials

“The final legislation creates a statewide process in which parents, school employees, or other complainants can appeal the decisions of locally elected officials on books challenged as being ‘inappropriate for the age or maturity levels’ of students who can access them.

How Biden grants and parent concerns of ‘indoctrination’ spurred Tennessee Republicans to limit how race and racism are taught

“The grant program — prioritizing instruction on diversity, anti-racism, and the legacy of slavery — unleashed a torrent of backroom discussions just 2½ weeks before Tennessee’s General Assembly adjourned on May 5.”

In their own words: How CRT and school curriculums are viewed by educators, students, and parents

First Person: How should the U.S. teach about slavery? Here’s how other countries face their most shameful chapters.

“All this is to say that if you close your eyes and spin the globe, guaranteed your finger will land on a country with a shameful past that endures. The United States, with its history of atrocities from slavery to the slaughter of Native American peoples, is no different. The legacy of those horrors is still very much with us. What distinguishes societies, however, is the extent to which they confront and address their difficult history.”

Tennessee students: CRT laws promote bias in school, hurt mental health

“Students from Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville said they’re disheartened by the law and its fallout, at a time when leading health officials are warning of an accelerating youth mental health crisis brought on by the pandemic.”

Tennessee educators respond to proposed limits on teaching about racism

“ ‘To be frank, the bill will not make it harder for my personal classroom because I plan to ignore it. Who’s going to enforce it? This is a bill that viciously favors white children and ignores the needs of children of color.’ ”

Tennessee law restricting classroom discussions on race inspires passionate, poignant and enraged feedback

“According to a Chalkbeat analysis of approximately 900 comments obtained through a public records request, almost half came from people identifying themselves as parents or grandparents. Nearly 60 came from current, former, or retired educators, and another 21 were submitted by advocacy, professional, or citizens groups.”

First Person: Students of color deserve to see themselves in their school curriculum

“I craved stories in which Black and brown people are visible, and their accomplishments are recognized. But I had to seek those out on my own.”

First Person: A ‘Golden Age’ for whom? Tennessee history standards need a rewrite.

“This past May, Tennessee passed a law that restricts the way students can be taught about race, including banning concepts related to critical race theory and any teaching that the United States or meritocracy is inherently racist or oppressive. This controversy has distracted from what is genuinely problematic in existing curricula: the whitewashing of history and the erasure of the experiences of Tennesseans of color.”

On race and schools, here’s what Americans agree and disagree on

2022-05-03T22:34:35+00:00

American schools have suddenly found themselves at the center of several fierce cultural debates, particularly related to race and racism. The stakes are high — both politically and educationally.

So what do American voters and parents actually think about these issues? It can be hard to get a good sense of that amid an avalanche of anecdotes, news stories, and viral videos.

Chalkbeat examined over 20 polls since last year to find out. In some cases, what we found was surprising, while others confirmed conventional wisdom. And there were instances of both widespread agreement and sharp division.

There are real divides in this country on how to teach about race and racism, particularly on whether to teach about racism as a present-day phenomenon. Parents are also divided about whether schools pay too much or too little attention to race and racism.

But most parents surveyed also say their child’s school does a good job keeping them apprised of what’s taught in class. More broadly, most Americans agree on certain issues: that schools should teach about the history of slavery and racism, that books shouldn’t be banned for political reasons, and that schools shouldn’t divide students by race for class discussions.

Keep in mind that polling provides only a snapshot of opinion, and results can shift based on question framing, political messaging, or the arguments of one side or the other. That said, here are several important takeaways from these surveys.

There is a fundamental divide among Americans on whether schools should focus more or less on race and racism.

Perhaps the simplest way of understanding the clashes over schools is the question posed in a recent Associated Press poll: “Do you think your local public school system is focusing too much or too little on racism in the U.S., or is the focus about right?”

Divisions were clear: 37% of Americans said about right, 34% said there was too little focus, and 27% said there was too much. In other words, a majority of adults believe schools need to change the amount of focus — but they diverge on what direction they should go. This split is echoed in other polling too, including surveys of parents.

There are really big racial and political differences on these issues

Divides about schools break sharply along racial and political lines. Democrats and people of color tend to support a stronger focus on race in schools; Republicans and white Americans tend to be much more skeptical of focusing on race. This pattern shows up in poll after poll in mostly predictable ways, including a national poll about how much schools should teach about racial inequality.

Critical race theory is not popular, but there are moderate levels of support for teaching about the present-day effects of racism.

The academic framework known as critical race theory has morphed into a catch-all term for conservative critics on the right to refer to practices in schools relating to race that they oppose. Unsurprisingly, it typically doesn’t poll all that well (although many people say they’re not sure what it means). At the same time, discussing the present-day effects of racism does draw meaningful, although not overwhelming, support. You can see the disconnect in a poll of Missouri voters.

In a national poll, a slim majority of Americans held negative views about critical race theory. (The academic framework of critical race theory probably is rarely taught in schools, although it has informed practices in some school systems.) At the same time, three-quarters said that public schools should “be allowed to teach about ideas and historical events that might make some students uncomfortable,” and even more opposed banning books in schools.

Another poll found that 53% of voters believe it’s appropriate to teach high school students that “systemic racism is embedded in American institutions,” while 46% say it’s not appropriate.

Americans more broadly agreed that schools should teach about slavery and racism as a historical matter.

Notably, though, people seem to have somewhat less appetite for frank discussions about race and racism in early grades.

Polling is mixed on a variety of racial equity efforts.

Some are quite unpopular. For instance, one poll found that 51% of adults favored tracking students by ability level, even though the question said that some fear that this will exacerbate racial inequities. Only 19% opposed tracking.

Another survey asked about grouping students by race “to encourage students to discuss their experiences with others who share their racial or ethnic background.” 76% of voters described this practice as harmful.

Most Americans of all races also favored using standardized test scores as a part of college admissions, despite recent pushback that these tests discriminate against Black and Hispanic students. And most also opposed race-based preferences in college admissions.

But polls show significant support for ideas like having students read a racially diverse set of authors or learn more about Black history. In one survey, 60% of public school parents said students should be encouraged to “read books by authors from a variety of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.”

There does not appear to be a widespread parent belief that schools are focusing too much on racism.

One poll found a plurality of parents, 40%, believed “schools are handling issues related to race and racism about right.” That was notably higher than the general public. Another 29% said schools aren’t focused enough on these issues.

In another recent survey, only 19% of parents said that the way their child’s school teaches about racism was inconsistent with their own values. 38% said the school’s approach was consistent with their values and another 32% weren’t sure.

The vast majority of parents also said their child’s school does at least a decent job keeping them abreast of curriculum on controversial topics, according to multiple polls.

Throughout the pandemic, most parents have expressed general satisfaction with their child’s school.

Democrats still have an edge on education issues — but it’s shrinking

All these issues are deeply linked with politics. After Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s upset win last year, Republicans have been on the offense on education issues. Many see attacks on critical race theory or too much attention to race in schools as a winning issue for this November.

But voters continue to trust Democrats on education issues more than Republicans, according to multiple polls. In one, 44% said Democrats’ values on education more closely align with their own, compared with 34% who favored Republicans. Parents gave Democrats a 5 point edge.

Another recent survey found a several-point advantage for Democrats, but showed that it had dipped since 2019, and was at its lowest point in many years.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

History class is under the microscope. This National Teacher of the Year is diving into lessons of race and oppression.

2022-04-19T18:53:52+00:00

Kurt Russell’s path to teaching was forged in his eighth grade math class.

It was there he met Larry Thomas, an energetic and tenacious educator who was also Russell’s first Black male teacher.

Russell liked that Thomas worked to connect with him over shared experiences, such as the fact that both of their families had migrated to Ohio from Alabama. He also admired how Thomas made math class relatable, like asking students to calculate an average using a famous basketball player’s performance statistics.

“He brought that cultural connection,” Russell said. “I just fell in love with him.”

That approach has stuck with Russell, who has taught history for more than 25 years in Ohio’s Oberlin City Schools, the same school district he attended as a child. Russell now teaches U.S. history, as well as courses he created on African American history and race, gender, and oppression. And it was his own work to connect with students and reflect their experiences in his lessons that helped earn Russell the title of National Teacher of the Year on Tuesday.

“We are living in a time when our students need conscientious teachers more than ever,” Russell wrote in his application, noting his parents attended segregated schools in the Jim Crow South, where Black students were denied basic resources at school, a disparity that still persists today. “While I cannot alter time or reverse past practices or policies, I can help construct opportunities for students of all races, ethnicities, religious affiliations, and gender identities.”

Chalkbeat talked with Russell about how teaching in his hometown allows him to forge deeper relationships with his students, why he created a history class focused on race, gender, and oppression, and what it’s been like to teach history at a time when lawmakers across the country, including in Ohio, are moving to restrict how race and racism are taught in schools.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What has it been like to come back and teach in the community you grew up in? How do you bring your own history to your lessons?

I always wanted to come back to Oberlin to teach, just because of what teachers in the community instilled in me. I’m able to connect with students because I’m connecting with their parents now, I’m connecting with their grandparents. I know them well.

I’m able to mention things that happened in Oberlin in a historical context. Oberlin is a hotbed for the Underground Railroad — we were Station No. 99. And there are several houses in Oberlin, on a street called College Street, that has the cellars where enslaved Africans were kept as they made their journey to Canada. As I mentioned these homes, students are like ‘Wow, I know that house!’ Students make a connection that way.

Can you tell me more about when you started teaching your race, gender, and oppression history class? What were you hoping students would take away from the class?

I started teaching that course maybe 13 or 14 years ago. Students came to me and said: Mr. Russell, are there any other courses that you teach? Because we want a little bit more than the typical U.S. history class. So I borrowed from my college first-year seminar. I believe the title was ‘Racism and Sexism in America.’ I said: You know what, I have readings from my college days, I have the syllabus, let me tweak it a little bit.

Russell teaches two classes at Oberlin High School he created that focus on African American history and the history of race, gender and oppression.

Right now, it’s still an elective, but it’s probably one of the most popular courses in the school because students see themselves in the lessons. We have topics such as the LGBTQ+ community, a Black Lives Matter unit, a women’s studies unit. A lot of the topics that we teach, students are able to see themselves, and they can create a narrative through their own stories.

Are there certain lessons that have been very engaging for students that you’ve noticed: ‘Wow this lesson really hit home for students’?

Every year as we study the LGBTQ+ unit, as we study Title IX, there is always a question that deals with: Should transgender students participate in athletics? Students really engage in that particular conversation because it’s current information. You see it on the news all the time, you see it in readings all the time.

In my classroom, students are, I wouldn’t say polarized, but they have different opinions. Which is great. But they’re able to have a discussion that’s respectful.

We set norms in my classroom, and we create a safe environment. Our norms are very basic: We will respect other people’s opinions. We will listen. Anything we say in the classroom stays in the classroom.

That’s what I really appreciate and really love about the class — it’s a microcosm of the United States of America. We are on the opposite sides on some of these hot topics, but should be on the same side, in terms of having respect for one another.

We’ve seen legislatures across the country putting restrictions on how race and racism can be taught. In Ohio, the legislature is considering some bills that haven’t passed, but would restrict talking about ‘divisive concepts.’ For you, as a history teacher, what has it been like to teach under that shadow?

My community, my students, and my school accept diversity within the curriculum. Even with some of the backlash, my students are more eager to learn, and my school district is more eager to put forth a more diverse curriculum. On a national and on a state level, you have individuals who may not agree with me, or with Oberlin City Schools, in teaching some of the subjects that are being taught.

Do your students bring up what’s happening at the state legislature in class? Have you had discussions about: Why are state legislatures considering putting laws in place that would change how history is taught?

Yes, they do. Especially in my race, gender and oppression class, we do readings and we watch TED Talks, and we watch news footage of discussions on these topics. Students just want to know more and more about it. It’s allowed my students to be more conscious about what’s happening and to voice their own opinion.

I know you helped create, along with other educators and students, the Black Student Union at your school a couple years ago. Can you say more about why you and others thought it was important that your school had this group?

After the untimely murder of George Floyd, two students said: Mr. Russell, we need to do something. They thought about creating a club. I belonged to the Black Student Union in college, we had some bylaws, and I shared that with my student group. And they took the initiative to run with it. We’ve met with the police chief, and with police officers, and resource officers, discussing that town-and-gown relationship. It has just made Oberlin High School a better place.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

In America, I faced Islamophobia right from the start

2022-03-21T19:52:51+00:00

“Do you know you have to come back here because they are banning Muslims?” my uncle, calling from Bangladesh, told me, his voice scared. It was 2017, and he had just heard about President Trump’s executive order barring people from a group of Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.

It was a terrifying thought, considering that it had taken my family 13 years to get U.S. immigrant visas, and we had only recently arrived in Philadelphia. According to my uncle who was watching the international news, we weren’t welcome here because of our religion. As it turned out, the executive order didn’t apply to us because Bangladesh — my mathribhumi, or motherland — was not one of the countries subject to the ban. But the call was unsettling because until then I hadn’t known that there was such a thing as Islamophobia. I never expected this kind of welcome to America.

My family dreamed of living in the United States. That dream and I were born the same year: 2003. This country represented a beacon of hope, freedom, and a new start. My parents wanted a better education for my siblings and me, and we wanted to be reunited with members of my mother’s family who were already in the U.S.

When our visas came through and we left Bangladesh, we thought we were answering the loud rapping of opportunity knocking. At the airport in Dhaka, the stifled sobs of my grandma, auntie, and uncle weighed down my steps across the gangplank. As the airplane took off, sweet memories of my former home and jumping rope in the schoolyard — places soon to be thousands of miles away — were flashing before me. That day while waiting on the plane, I wrote in my journal, “I feel numb. I don’t know how I will cope with the new culture, new people, new everything.”

I knew the transition would be challenging, especially since I spoke only a few words of English when I arrived. (Bengali is my mother tongue.) I just didn’t think my religion — and my hijab, or traditional Muslim headscarf — would be a factor. Where I came from, most people were Muslim, and many wore headscarves. My faith and clothing had never before called attention to themselves.

But when I started school in Philadelphia, they did. I walked through the halls on my first day, everyone stared. I seemed to be the only one wearing a hijab. Mine was covered in small pink flowers. I saw students in the hall, throwing menacing stares my way. Aiming to break the ice, I said “hey,” and introduced myself — using some of the few English words I knew. I sighed, thinking I did OK. Then someone giggled and pointed at my clothes, which was greeted with a supportive chuckle from her friends. Another boy mimicked my accent with exaggerated hand gestures, receiving roars of laughter from his friends. Someone shouted, “Look at her! What is that thing on her head?” Someone else tried to pull off my hijab. I felt stinging my eyes, but I bit my lip and said nothing.

I never expected this kind of welcome.

When I got home from school and shared my bitter experience with my mother, she smiled. She took me to her shoulders. “Ma,” my mom said, using a Bengali term of endearment, “accept the beauty in differences. Don’t be cowed by the negativity of others. Just remember, what makes us different makes us beautiful.” My mother’s words were Dua for me.

The racist and Islamophobic teasing continued, but in time I met other students who were recent immigrants to America and also learning English. They came from Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. A few other girls even wore hijabs. My ESL class was a place where I didn’t feel like I had to know the language and culture to fit in.

When I started high school the following year, I also met other friends who asked with interest, with maturity and not malice, about my faith. I told them about my beliefs, and also about the obstacles I’ve faced in America — about the so-called Muslim ban that coincided with our arrival, about the bullying I have endured, and about the hateful implications that Muslims are terrorists. (I didn’t even know what terrorism was before I came to the U.S.)

In America, I have sometimes felt sad, but I have never felt ashamed about my identity and culture. It’s what makes me unique and makes me stand out from the crowd. As my mom said on that difficult first day of school, it’s what makes me beautiful.

Umme Orthy is a senior at Science Leadership Academy at Beeber in Philadelphia and will be attending Haverford College in the fall. She is a Chalkbeat Student Voices fellow.

Students at Newark charter school protest treatment of Black teachers

2022-03-18T21:45:55+00:00

Hundreds of students walked out of a Newark charter school and rallied outside City Hall on Friday to call attention to what students said is the frequent mistreatment of Black students and faculty.

Around 9 a.m., students began streaming out of the Lincoln Park High School campus of North Star Academy, which is New Jersey’s largest charter school operator with more than 6,000 students in Newark and Camden. After marching from the Central Ward campus to nearby City Hall, student organizers and a former teacher gave speeches about a culture of anti-Blackness they said pervades the school, while scores of students cheered and waved signs.

“We’re tired and we’ve been fed up,” 12th grader Kwadjo Otoo called out from the steps of the historic building, adding that some Black teachers and students continue to feel disrespected despite efforts by the charter operator’s leadership to address complaints about the schools. “Now they’re trying to pretend like something changed, but we know it’s the same school we’ve been going to forever now.”

Several students said multiple Black teachers over the years have left the school, which the students said is because the teachers felt overworked and undervalued. When well-liked Black teachers depart, their absence can leave students feeling isolated, they said.

“It’s very upsetting for us to build bonds with our teachers, to build relationships and connect,” said L. Drummond, a senior at the Lincoln Park campus, “and then see them chased out by the school.”

The school went into lockdown during the protest, and students who left were not allowed back in after they returned from City Hall. Locked out of school, the students began to disperse around 10:30 a.m.; some said they planned to walk home while others set out for a different North Star campus downtown.

Tasha Smith went to the school Friday morning to pick up her son, a 12th grader who joined in the protest, but said she was not allowed in the building.

“Nobody can come in or out,” she said, adding that she only learned about the students’ grievances because of the protest. “This is my first time hearing this, and I’m very upset.”

North Star spokesperson Barbara Martinez said in a statement that the type of advocacy students engaged in Friday can be a powerful learning experience.

“We believe in and tell our students that their voice matters, and we respect their peaceful protest today,” she said. “We look forward to listening and working/discussing in the coming days to address student concerns and collaborate with students and families on the challenges raised.”

Tasha Grant, a former North Star Academy theater teacher, spoke to students at a rally Friday outside Newark’s city hall.

North Star Academy, which is part of the Uncommon Schools network of charter schools, is one of New Jersey’s oldest and highest-achieving charter schools. In the 2019-20 school year, 83% of North Star students were Black, 15% Hispanic, and more than 86% were economically disadvantaged, according to state data, yet the students routinely outperform their peers in wealthier districts on state standardized tests.

But like other so-called “no excuses” charter schools, North Star has long had a reputation for strict discipline along with its demanding academic program. In 2019-20, the most recent year with available state data, nearly 19% of North Star students received suspensions — a rate about six times higher than the average across New Jersey or in the Newark school district.

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 drew widespread attention to anti-Black racism in all facets of American society, many young people took to social media to recount instances of racism at school. Current and former students and staff members at Uncommon Schools began sharing their experiences through an Instagram account called Black at Uncommon, where many described a school culture that felt overly controlling and occasionally unwelcoming to Black people.

Julie Jackson, the president of Uncommon Schools, which also oversees charter schools in New York and Boston, published a letter to the school community in July 2020 saying she had read the accounts of negative experiences at some schools. Writing that “we must resolve and work to be an anti-racist organization,” Jackson, who is Black, promised a series of immediate actions. The steps included hiring a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant; reviewing the curriculum to make sure it reflects students’ cultures; and training employees to create a school culture “where all students and staff feel respected, valued, and cared for.”

Students who walked out of North Star Academy’s Lincoln Park High School in protest on Friday were not allowed back into the building.

On Friday, some students at the Newark protest said they saw some evidence of those steps, such as staff members being assigned to read a book about the harsh disciplining of Black students. But others questioned how deep the changes really went. For instance, instead of sending some students home for suspension, North Star now puts them in “on-site learning,” essentially an in-school suspension where students spend the entire day in one room, students said.

Aubria King, an 11th grader who is a member of Lincoln Park High School’s student council, said the school had given students a little more freedom since 2020. However, the school’s strict discipline and heavy workload continue to take a toll on students, she said.

“They do provide us with a good education and we are getting into these great schools,” she said. “But it comes at a cost and that cost is our mental health and the way that we’re being treated.”

Martinez, the Uncommon Schools spokesperson, said the organization hired a company that provides every student with access to counseling.

Across the organization, 45% of staff members identify as Black or African American and 67% identify as non-white, Martinez added.

Despite the large percentage of employees of color, at least one former teacher said the school sometimes felt hostile to Black people. At the rally, Tasha Grant, who taught theater at North Star until 2020, said she felt censored and policed at the school.

“You all deserve Black educators that don’t get pushed out of these systems,” she told students outside of city hall. “You all deserve to be in classrooms that nurture you and keep you safe.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city and across New Jersey. Contact Patrick at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia is updating its mandated African American history course

2022-03-08T17:41:21+00:00

Students who walked into Stacy Hill’s classroom at Northeast High School one day last month for their African American history course saw this name on the white board: Amir Locke.

Locke was shot to death by police last month in Minneapolis after they entered his apartment using a no-knock warrant. It was Hill’s way of introducing the day’s essential question: “When did Black lives become less valuable than white lives here in America?”

In another Northeast classroom later that day, students in Keziah Ridgeway’s class broke into groups to conduct discussions modeled after the 19th century Colored Conventions. At these meetings, held before and after the Civil War, Black leaders in the North and South organized in an effort to expand their rights.

Among the questions Ridgeway’s students considered: If you were alive during slavery, would you have supported a Black-led movement to go to Africa?

More than 15 years ago, Philadelphia became the first big city in the country to mandate an African American history course as a requirement for high school graduation. Now, at a time when dozens of states have adopted or debated laws to restrict teaching about race and racism, the city is embarking on a major initiative to revise and update the course Hill and Ridgeway are teaching, and also to infuse African American history and culture into the lower grades.

The effort stems from the Board of Education’s 2020 adoption of a set of “goals and guardrails” to guide its policy-making, one of which was to address and dismantle racist practices in a school district where the majority of students are Black and Latino.

Keziah Ridgeway leads her African American history class at Northeast High School.

Philadelphia “was leading the way before the political environment we’re existing in right now,” said Ismael Jimenez, the social studies curriculum specialist at the district who is directing the effort to revitalize the course. The plan is for the district to introduce the new curriculum next school year.

The district has not significantly changed the course, which is taught in the 10th grade, since introducing it in 2005. It uses a standard textbook that was last updated in 2011, and the course’s rigor, focus, and content have largely depended on individual teachers.

When Jimenez assumed his position a year ago, he said, “I recognized the gap from when the course was first implemented and where we’re at today.”

He has convened a group of veteran teachers to rethink the curriculum, and is investing in extensive, required professional development that includes a series of lectures and workshops that feature Africana studies luminaries like Bettina Love and Hasan Jeffries.

His aim is to make the course less dependent on a textbook and more reliant on primary sources. This would refocus the class on the “intellectual genealogy” of the African diaspora, Black resistance, and Black leadership in the United States, from Booker T. Washington to Malcolm X and beyond.

“Marcus Garvey read ‘Up from Slavery’ and was inspired to start the Universal Improvement Association, which Malcolm X’s parents belonged to,” Jimenez said.

And he wants to talk about these concepts “in an authentic way, not just as a procession of individuals.”

“We want students to understand how ideas of race were developed differently throughout the world depending on the orientation of European enslavers’ shifting definitions based on the size of enslaved African populations,” he said.

Students in Keziah Ridgeway’s class in a small discussion group, modeled after the Colored Conventions of the 19th Century that sought solutions to questions facing Black Americans.

‘More than just a few names’

In the nearly two years since George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis, racial justice movements have demanded more attention to African American history and culture in schools.

But a fierce backlash has developed as well, including in the Philadelphia region, in the form of a push to ban critical race theory from the K-12 curriculum, though it is not typically taught below the college level. An academic framework that studies how politics and the law perpetuate systemic racism, CRT has become a catch-all for conservatives who oppose equity initiatives and, in some cases, any teaching about race, bias, and racism.

Thirty-six states, including Pennsylvania, have introduced legislation that aims to restrict what can be taught about racism and bias. Pennsylvania’s bill along these lines, HB 1532, has languished in the House Education Committee without action for nearly a year.

In Philadelphia, educators think the course and the issues it deals with remain as crucial as they were in 2005, when the School Reform Commission adopted the mandate.

“What we wanted to do is highlight the fact that African American history is an integral part of world and U.S. history,” said Sandra Dungee Glenn, the School Reform Commission chair when the district made the course mandatory. “African American history is more than just a few names.”

Jimenez has an ambitious goal to make African American history “a centerpiece of what the district is doing” by 2025, the 20th anniversary of the mandate, and not only through one course, but by infusing its sensibility throughout the K-12 experience.

Jimenez taught the course himself for more than a decade at Germantown High School, which is now closed, and at Kensington Creative and Performing Arts High School. Both he and Ridgeway have been active in the Racial Justice Organizing Committee and the Melanated Educators Collective, which are groups that consist of educators and campaign for antiracist policies.

With the board’s new commitment to antiracism through its “goals and guardrails” initiative, teachers in those groups are helping to lead the movement rather than agitating from the outside.

Keziah Ridgeway teaches African American history at Northeast High School.

“I didn’t get a lot of Black history in school,” said Ridgeway, who graduated from Girls High School in 2003. “We learned the usual ‘Christopher Columbus was a great person’” version of America’s founding and development focused on white men, she said. What Ridgeway, who is Black, gleaned about African American history came from books her father gave her and from TV shows like “Roots.”

Jimenez said that the course sheds light on the role of oppression in all human societies. “It benefits whites, Latino, Asian students to understand the deeper and larger history of African Americans” in this country.”

Like Philadelphia’s teaching force in general, most of those teaching African American history are white. They are also cognizant of how this might affect their approach to the topic.

”I’m open and honest with students that there’s a lot of things I can teach them and a lot I can’t,” said Nicholaus Bernadini, a social studies teacher at Samuel Fels High School who is white. “Like being Black growing up in the U.S.”

Adam Sanchez, who is also white and teaches African American history at Central High School, said he approaches the course “as trying to figure out what our society is. We still live in an incredibly racist society, and how do we deal with that?

“There’s a mythology that the civil rights movement was just in the 1950s to 1970s,” he said. “The struggle starts on the coast of Africa.”

Both Bernadini and Sanchez are on the team Jimenez assembled to update the course.

Bernadini said he starts his teaching by highlighting what happened on Nov. 17, 1967, when hundreds of Philadelphia students marched from their schools to the Board of Education headquarters. They were demanding more teaching of African American history, among other changes.

As Mark Shedd, the superintendent at the time, spoke to a delegation of students inside the building, police assaulted those who remained outside, on the orders of former police Commissioner Frank Rizzo.

That protest “leads to the African American history curriculum being developed in the first place,” Bernadini said. “It’s an empowering story.” A historical marker commemorating that event will be unveiled on March 19 at the former district headquarters at 21st Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

Northeast High School students participate in a mock Colored Convention, modeled after the 19th century conventions where participants sought solutions for problems affecting Black America.

Awareness should start early

Not all teachers have been content to wait for the district to revamp the course and expand its influence. Karen Williams, the literacy coach at Muñoz-Marin Elementary School in Kensington, said she is “on a mission” to bring African American history to all city students from the earliest grades.

Like Ridgeway and Jimenez, she is active in the city teachers union’s racial justice caucuses, and also grew up in the city and attended its public schools.

“We studied Martin Luther King and learned about Rosa Parks,” she said. “That was pretty much it.”

At Muñoz-Marin, she has created a framework for students to study race and racism. Starting in prekindergarten and kindergarten, students focus on the meaning of “difference.” Older students study topics like identity, empathy, and inclusion.

“We want to really embrace the idea of diversity,” she said. “We use our differences to learn from each other.”

African American history teacher John Winters with Dobbins High School students Kayla Woods at left, Abbishai Allison, and Shanay Anderson-Nixon, seated.

Shanay Anderson-Nixon, a tenth grader at Dobbins High School in North Philadelphia, is in John Winters’ African-American history section. She said she appreciates the course, but adds: “Why am I learning about all this now? Why is it just one year?” In her majority Black elementary and middle schools, she said, “We didn’t touch on it. I had to wait until 10th grade for a Black teacher who cared about what Black people did.”

To explore the answer to the question she posed at the beginning of her class about the value of Black lives, Stacy Hill at Northeast High School reviewed the treatment of Black people brought to America in the 1600s, before America became a nation or had an established legal system. The devaluing of Black lives began then, she said.

Her featured vocabulary word that day was “chattel,” which means an item of property, as in “chattel slavery.”

“The story of the African American struggle is a story against oppression and the resilience of oppressed people,” she said. Oppression due to ethnicity or racial characteristics occurs, she said, “in every culture and every piece of land on the earth.”

Stacy Hill teaches African American history at Northeast High School. Her class focused on the question, “When did Black lives become less valuable than white lives here in America?”

The students at Northeast come from backgrounds that reach across the globe, from China and Iran to Ukraine. Students in Hill’s class expressed enthusiasm for the African American history course.

“It changes your perspective on many things,” said Ayham Muhanna, a Palestinian student. “You learn what people have been through and how rough it was before and how history hasn’t really changed that much.”

“African American history is my favorite course,” said classmate Mayaser Omar, who is also Palestinian. “And the most important one.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in the city. She is a former president of the Education Writers Association. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org. Correction: This story has been updated from an earlier version that stated the Racial Justice Organizing Committee is associated with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. It is not.

Philly district will get 5,000 copies of a book celebrating Black Philadelphians

2022-02-23T20:26:18+00:00

Philadelphia students will get the chance to read about 14 prominent Black Philadelphians as Temple University’s Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection is giving the district 5,000 copies of “Black Lives Always Mattered!,” a graphic novel-style book it published with a grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.

Diane Turner, curator of the Blockson Collection, said getting the books into Philadelphia schools is a way of countering racial stereotypes and “sensationalism” about poverty and crime.

The donation comes as school boards, lawmakers, and parents across the country are working to ban teachers from mentioning race or discrimination, with some schools pulling books from library shelves and trying to ban critical race theory instruction. At least 36 states have adopted or introduced laws or policies restricting teaching about race or racism, according to a Chalkbeat analysis.

Six of the 10 most challenged books in an American Library Association survey of materials targeted in 2020 touch on racial issues, with complaints including “racial slurs”(“To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Of Mice and Men”) and “divisive language” (“Something Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice).” “The Hate U Give,” a story of a girl whose best friend was fatally shot by a police officer, was challenged for profanity and an “anti-police message.”

Laws and regulations are being pushed across the country. A Texas law that took effect in December 2021 says teachers who discuss widely debated issues must do so “free from political bias” and bans lessons that might make individuals feel “blame or guilt for actions committed by other members of the same race or sex.” Governor Greg Abbott has also promoted a “parental bill of rights” that would require instructional materials to be posted online at the beginning of a semester.

And in Tennessee, a county school board pulled “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel using cats and mice as stand-ins for Nazis and Jews during the Holocaust, citing “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity” and “depiction of violence and suicide.”

That’s not happening in Philadelphia, said Ismael Jimenez, social studies curriculum specialist for the School District of Philadelphia. “In Philadelphia, we kind of are isolated in our bubble, where we’re able to take ‘Black Lives Always Mattered!’ and distribute it in schools,” he said. “We haven’t heard or received any backlash.”

But in other parts of the state, there is talk of limiting teaching about race. Republican lawmakers have introduced a bill that would restrict the teaching of “racist and sexist concepts” in Pennsylvania public schools and universities.

Turner hopes the book will encourage students and others to visit the Blockson Collection — admission is free — and learn more about the individuals featured in the book and other notable African-Americans. The public can read or purchase “Black Lives Always Mattered!” there, she said. Jiminez said there will be one copy for each school in the district, and African-American history teachers will receive extra copies for their classes. There will also be an opportunity for teacher training on how to teach graphic novels, a “transferable skill,” he said.

The plan is to focus on schools in North Central Philadelphia. “Most schools in and around the Temple neighborhood are comprehensive high schools,” Jimenez said. “It’s very important for us to really center our energy on those areas usually neglected for the Mastermans and Centrals,” he said.

The Blockson Collection put together a team of artists to illustrate the stories of notable 20th-century Philadelphians, Turner said. “We felt it was important for all students to be able to see themselves in the curriculum, because that’s what motivates them,” she said. “We also wanted to promote literacy, and the graphic novel is something young people like.”

The book features well-known figures such as author and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and singer Marian Anderson, in addition to some less famous Philadelphians like architect Julian Abele, who helped design the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“Everybody runs to the Rocky statue,” Turner said. “To the left of that, there’s a state historical marker which nobody really notices” commemorating Abele’s efforts, she said.

The book also features religious leaders Rev. Leon Sullivan, founder of the first Black-owned shopping center in the United States – Progress Plaza — and community activist Father Paul Washington, who held the first Black Power conference, Turner said. Christopher Perry, founder of The Philadelphia Tribune, and photographer John W. Mosley, who documented the lives of Black Philadelphians, are also featured.

Cecil B. Moore is a name neighborhood students know, but that’s likely because of the boulevard named after him, Turner said. “A lot of students don’t know who he is,” and the book will “give them the opportunity to know” about the life of the lawyer and activist, she said.

Black parents at Philly’s Carver E&S High School say new admissions process is unfair to them

2022-02-17T20:30:05+00:00

When George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science, one of Philadelphia’s elite magnets, was awarded a coveted Blue Ribbon in 2019, Board of Education President Joyce Wilkerson praised it as a beacon of excellence.

“I want to salute Carver’s commitment to diversity and equity – it does it in a way no one else does. It’s unmatched in the city,” said Wilkerson.

Yet as Philadelphia revamps its citywide selective admissions policy in the name of improving diversity and equity, no school has been disrupted as much as Carver, a predominantly Black school. Since the lottery-based, centralized process was unveiled, some Carver parents have lamented that the new system hurts them and their children.

“It’s causing a lot of anxiety,” said Angelique Gerald, whose son Tafari was wait-listed for Carver’s ninth grade, even though he is currently attending the school as an eighth grader. “He is a straight-A student. He has immersed himself in the ‘Carver way’ since seventh grade. I don’t understand any of this. He’s done everything they told him to do.”

Like students admitted to Carver’s seventh and eighth grade middle-years program, Tafari assumed, based on the prevailing practice, that as long as he kept up his grades and remained otherwise qualified, he could stay until graduation. He has a closetful of Carver T-shirts and other paraphernalia he has collected since he enrolled.

This year’s overhauled policy, however, does not give preference to current Carver eighth graders for the ninth grade. They were put in a citywide lottery pool with everyone else.

As a result, parents said, 24 of the current 66 eighth graders, including Tafari, were wait-listed; most of them were Black students.

“The perception is that [the new process] mostly impacts affluent families who want to send their children to Masterman,” said Tanya Folk, a Carver parent whose child did get an acceptance to the high school. “But this has also had an impact on regular Black families.”

It seems the district underestimated interest in the school – while each new class is usually around 200 students, so far more than 300 have indicated they will accept the offer to attend, parents were told at a meeting Wednesday night.

So next year’s ninth grade could be 50% larger than usual, while excluding as many as two dozen qualified current eighth graders at the school who wanted to stay.

Just blocks away from Temple University is George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science, considered to be one of Philadelphia’s elite magnet schools.

“I feel like it’s really not fair,” Tafari said. “I had expectations of being there in ninth grade and was looking forward to another friend going there with me. But all that went away.”

The new admissions system was unveiled in October, just weeks before the selection window for eighth graders began. Revised with little public input, it replaced a process in which principals and school-based admissions committees at the district’s 21 most coveted “criteria-based” schools made the final choices from among qualified students in shaping their incoming classes.

Admission to a group of so-called “citywide” high schools had already been done by lottery. But the new process added the most selective schools and programs to the lottery system, while also giving preference to students from four low-income ZIP codes.

While the new policy has been fraught with controversy since the start, district leaders have been steadfast in defending it as a huge step forward and the centerpiece of its commitment to antiracism by removing bias and opening opportunities to deserving students who didn’t have them before.

For too long, “We collectively upheld a process we’ve known for years is inequitable and in some cases not even equal,” Karyn Lynch, the district’s chief of student support services, told the City Council during a December hearing.

Asked about the parental complaints, Superintendent William Hite said that, by definition, not every qualified child who sought admission would get in under the new system. The point, he said, was to expand who is qualified and then treat all the students equitably so that good students from schools and neighborhoods that rarely apply to or get into magnets now have a chance.

“You know by virtue of a lottery there are going to be some children who are not successful [in getting into their preferred schools], but we still feel that giving more qualified students the opportunity to have access to these programs is the more important thing,” said Hite, who is leaving the district in August after 10 years.

But many parents of children who didn’t get their top choices – and even some who did – say the new process has its own flaws, citing its arbitrariness and wondering about fairness and equity when some stellar students are offered no placements at all.

“In essence, this lottery system created a cruel, high-stakes game of musical chairs. When the music stopped, it was clear that some students would not find a seat,” said a letter from a group called Parents for Excellent Schools that has formed in opposition to the changes. “Yet this was the vision of equity advanced by the district.”

Becoming an antiracist institution is one of the chief aims of “goals and guardrails” adopted by the Board of Education in 2020. Back then, Hite also talked about reforming the selective admissions system, which became a huge issue during protests that summer after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The uproar was focused on the district’s two most selective schools, Central High and Julia R. Masterman, which are predominantly white and Asian American, even though the district’s enrollment is 80% Black and Latino.

But Carver’s enrollment is predominantly Black, and more than three-fourths of the students come from low-income families. Wilkerson noted in her 2019 speech that it boasts a 100% college acceptance rate, and most of the students are the first in their family to attend college.

Most of the 24 students who attend Carver’s middle school but were wait-listed for the high school are Black, said Sherice Sargent, whose daughter is among them. If the goal of the new policy is equity, she said, it doesn’t feel like that to her. She said that she doesn’t understand why the district didn’t offer spots to all the current students who qualified and wanted to stay, since they still had plenty of seats for others.

“We came here understanding that our students could continue [at Carver] as long as they met the criteria,” Sargent said. “They admitted to telling us that, but said they are no longer honoring what we told you.”

In 2013, Carver added seventh and eighth grades in an effort to help prepare students for the courses and rigor of the high school, Carver and district officials said then. Ted Domers, the longtime principal of Carver who is now assistant superintendent for the learning network that includes the school, said that it had always been the case that Carver eighth graders had to reapply for ninth grade, and he made that clear to all students.

“One of the things I shared, every single year all students had to participate in a competitive process,” he said.

Like those elsewhere, all Carver eighth graders applied to five high schools and each class would include some students who left for other competitive schools, including Central High and Creative and Performing Arts High School, or CAPA, he said.

But, Domers said, it is also true, as parents contend, that when the admissions process was largely school-based and not driven by a citywide lottery, Carver eighth graders who qualified, and wanted to stay, would almost always get in.

He added: “The focus on equity is to give more opportunity for students to attend [Carver] than in the past.”

But for the disappointed Carver parents, any chance of getting in from the waitlist are slim to none, given the current over-enrollment. Carver is among five schools and special programs where the waitlists were closed.

“We’re not trying to get the district to make an exception for us, but to honor what we were told,” said Sargent. She has a son in 12th grade at the school, has served as president of the Home and School Association, and has done other volunteer work on its behalf. She said she is not blind to the issue of equity and opportunity.

During her time as HSA president, “We adopted three [nearby high-poverty] middle schools so they can pipeline into Carver,” Sargent said.

But she said she was told that many students from those schools who applied were ineligible due to scores on a controversial machine-scored writing test, which was also introduced this year as a requirement for five top city schools, including Carver.

State standardized tests in English language arts and math, the PSSA, which were previously a gatekeeper for admission to the most selective schools, have not been administered for two years due to the pandemic. Sargent believes the larger-than-expected acceptance rate at Carver may have been due to the use of the writing test. The cutoff score for Masterman and Central was 21.5, while it was 16.5 for Carver and Academy at Palumbo. Students who just missed the cutoff for Central and Masterman might have flocked to Carver and Palumbo, Sargent speculated.

“I’m a middle-class family, I bought my home and made an eight-year commitment to [Carver],” Sargent said.

Lynch, whose office oversees the selective admissions process, said that the new enrollment policy has opened it up to more students, and that the increased interest in Carver is one indicator of its success.

“The part about having more students with an interest in attending the school is significant,” she said. “We have more students across the city and other schools that are extremely interested in Carver. Applications increased greatly.”

Philadelphia’s system of neighborhood and selective, themed schools has produced some of the “best” and some of the “worst” high schools in the country; some of the most racially diverse and some of the most racially isolated.

Central High School, which was all male until 1983, and Girls High go back to the 19th century. But specialty schools proliferated in the 1970s, when schools like Carver and CAPA were created to promote desegregation. Masterman added a high school and became highly selective during that period.

In the early 2000s, on the wave of a national movement touting small high schools as more personal and able to meet student needs, then-Superintendent Paul Vallas created a raft of them, including Palumbo. More recently, during Hite’s administration, additional specialized project-based high schools sprung up aimed at students who still weren’t succeeding in any of the other options. These included the LINC (Learning in New Contexts), Workshop School, and the U School.

Many of the 24 wait-listed students, including Tafari and Sargent’s daughter, were accepted into other selective schools, but not places they necessarily wanted to attend. Vicki McCarvey’s son got into Masterman, but would rather stay at Carver because of its focus on robotics and other aspects of engineering that interest him most, she said.

”I’m not sure this is increasing equity,” she said. “I feel they could have grandfathered in students from the feeder middle school that they made promises to and then let new parents and new kids know coming in that they are not guaranteed a spot.”

Tafari, who lives in Mount Airy, got into Palumbo, another coveted magnet, but it is in South Philadelphia, at the other end of town. His mother said that she thinks Palumbo is a great school, but still wonders what is accomplished by making him move from a nearby school where he has thrived to travel a long distance to another one.

“This is not just about my son, at least he had a choice,” she said.

Sargent’s daughter got into A.B. Saul High School, which has a focus on agriculture, which doesn’t particularly interest her. “Saul is completely different from Carver, I don’t even know what the inside of the building looks like,” Sargent said.

Hite, Lynch and other district officials have made it clear that they may revise the process going forward based on an evaluation of what happened this year. “We’ll work out any revisions and changes we need to make after we see the data and make the report to the board,” Hite said. The date for such a report has not yet been set.

But any changes will come too late for this year’s eighth graders.

“This is such a strain on me,” Sargent said. “I’m supporting my son to go to college, and now I’m thrust into finding a high school for my child. And I’m making a decision under duress. Blindly.”

Tennessee lawmakers to take up governor’s school library bill

2022-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Gov. Bill Lee wants a new school library law in Tennessee to ensure parents know what materials are available to students, but school librarians say parents already have access to that information.

Some critics worry such a law could be abused to purge books about certain topics that some parents and students find uncomfortable.

The governor’s proposal, dubbed the “Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022,” is scheduled to debut in two legislative committees this week at the state Capitol.

The discussions come after several Tennessee districts removed books they considered controversial from reading lists — and amid a nationwide surge in book challenges by parents, activists, and others.

Last fall, Republican governors in Texas and South Carolina ordered systematic reviews of school library materials in those states. And the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has reported an “unprecedented” number of book challenges nationwide in 2021. Many of the 10 most challenged books deal with race.

In his annual state address to Tennesseans, Lee, a Republican, called for a school library law “to create greater accountability at the local level so parents are empowered to make sure content is age-appropriate.”

His bill, sponsored by GOP majority leaders Rep. William Lamberth of Portland and Sen. Jack Johnson of Franklin, would require each public school to publish on its website the full list of books, magazines, newspapers, films, and other materials in the library. They also would have to adopt policies to hear feedback about content and to periodically review their libraries to ensure materials are “appropriate for the age and maturity levels” of students who can access them.

Those policies are already “standard practice” in most public schools across Tennessee, according to Lindsey Kimery, recent president of the Tennessee Association of School Librarians.

“What we’re concerned about is how this legislation could play out if it leads to policies and actions over and above what’s considered best practices,” said Kimery, who is also library coordinator for Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. “For instance, a principal might feel the need on the front end to go through the collection line by line and purge books unnecessarily to head off any potential complaints.”

Representatives of the school librarians group have met twice with officials in Lee’s administration to discuss their concerns.

“We felt heard,” Kimery said late last week.

In Tennessee, book debates have simmered for more than a year and contributed to passage of a 2021 law limiting what teachers can say in the classroom about racial bias and systemic racism. But the focus has been mainly on controlling curriculum and instruction, not library books.

Most recently in East Tennessee, McMinn County’s school board voted to remove “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its required reading list for eighth-graders. Minutes of the Jan. 10 meeting cited “inappropriate language” and an illustration of a nude woman.

In Williamson County, south of Nashville, a committee formed to review curriculum complaints, including many from the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, agreed to remove one book from its fourth-grade curriculum and restrict instruction on seven others. Gone is the Newbery Award-winning “Walk Two Moons,” about the journey of a 13-year-old girl with a Native American heritage to process her grief about losing her mother.

Lee’s library bill zeroes in on “age-appropriateness” but doesn’t define what that is. It doesn’t suggest that Tennessee school libraries are peddling “obscene materials,” as does another bill filed last month by Republican Rep. Scott Cepicky of Culleoka and Sen. Joey Hensley of Hohenwald to remove books that are deemed unwholesome.

The governor’s bill is scheduled to go before a House education subcommittee on Tuesday and the Senate Education Committee on Wednesday. The legislation’s goal is to make sure Tennessee has statewide standards to regularly review school library collections, said Luke Gustafson, a senior policy adviser to Johnson, the Senate co-sponsor.

“Some districts already adhere very well to those best practices, and there are some that could do better. The point is to set a baseline,” Gustafson said.

But Sen. Raumesh Akbari, who is the lone Democrat on the Senate’s education committee, called the bill “an unnecessary intrusion.”

“As a child, I viewed the library as a magical place where I could read books to go places that I couldn’t physically go and to learn about all kinds of people and places and things,” said the Memphis lawmaker. “To make it a political issue is a disservice to our students and an insult to our school librarians who are highly trained and have expertise on what’s age-appropriate. They don’t need to be micromanaged.”

Media experts suggest school libraries should be the last worry for parents and government officials. Social media makes it relatively easy for kids and teens to access inappropriate content — from misinformation to cyberbullying to outright pornography — through YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

The nonprofit Common Sense Media, which helps educators and families navigate today’s media landscape, doesn’t think censorship is the answer to today’s book battles.

“There’s plenty of online content out there now that’s much more visually explicit than books in our school libraries,” said Christine Elgersma, the organization’s senior editor of learning content.

“It’s also important to keep in mind that our schools are places where ideas can be introduced in a controlled environment and where there can be a rich discussion moderated by an adult and witnessed by a whole group of students,” she said. “Compare that to a child or teen being alone in their bedroom with a computer or cell phone and trying to process a lot of iffy content all by themselves.”

Think my South Side high school is a ‘bad school’? Think again.

2022-02-08T12:00:00+00:00

When I say I attend Wendell Phillips, a public high school in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, people who know me as quiet and studious are often surprised. They ask me why, out of all the high schools in Chicago, did I choose Phillips?

When I tell people that I go to Phillips, they often make untrue or unkind assumptions: That I’m not smart or goal-oriented, that I’m obsessed with sports, especially football, and that I couldn’t have gotten into a “better” high school.

But I’m proud to go to Phillips, even if I didn’t exactly choose it.

I moved to the U.S. from Nigeria in middle school, enrolling in school just two months before eighth grade graduation. I missed the standardized tests that more competitive high schools used to screen students. My elementary school counselor told me that the only school that would accept me is Phillips.

I enrolled there and have never regretted it.

Named for an abolitionist and an advocate for Native American rights, Wendell Phillips Academy High School was founded in 1904, and it would later become Chicago’s first predominantly Black public high school. Today, Phillips students are almost all Black and from low-income families.

At around 56%, the school’s four-year graduation rate is significantly below the city and state averages. That’s probably because so many of its students don’t have what they need to do well. The school doesn’t have enough teachers, mental health professionals, or after-school activities to support its students. There’s just one psychologist to serve the school’s more than 500 students.

Phillips students are required to pass through metal detectors, which occasionally pick up security risks, but more often make students late for class. Fights on school grounds are common. The security situation hit a low point this school year when a 14-year-old student and a security guard were shot right outside the school building.

You may read this and think Phillips is a “bad” school, but it’s not. It’s filled with intelligent teens who aim to do great things and positively impact their communities. Teachers and counselors who care sincerely about their students work there. But Phillips is a school where students and staff often don’t have the resources to do their best work. A lot of it boils down to money.

Inside a school that people often dismiss are bright and unique students who want to make a difference.

The school building is evidence of that. When I was a sophomore, the steps at the building’s main entrance collapsed, and you could see into the basement. The heating and cooling system is antiquated, and classrooms are almost always too hot or too cold. In one of the bathrooms, the ceiling looks about to collapse. There are stalls that don’t lock, broken washbasins, and leaky pipes. Phillips needs a real renovation – not just a patch on its most urgent wound.

Wendell Phillips is located in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood.

Problems with the building are just a part of it. Many Phillips students face challenges including food and housing insecurity. They don’t have Wi-Fi at home. Without the basics, it can be hard for students to focus on their schoolwork. For example, a student I mentor always comes late to school because he needs to care for his sister’s child. That makes him miss his first two classes, which he is failing. He needs more help than he’s getting.

Also, students need after-school jobs. I don’t know what I would have done without paid work. With the money I earned, I helped support my family. Many other students need to earn money for their families, too. But there aren’t enough jobs, and even if there were, we’d need more school staff to connect students with the right opportunities.

And you know what would also help? Giving Phillips students more of a say in how their school works. Yes, we have a student council, but its decisions are limited to things like prom and spirit week. But on issues that affect us most — from dress codes to scheduling to the need for female security guards, in addition to male ones — it feels like our opinions aren’t heard or valued.

But our broken building and the challenges that make daily living and learning so much harder aren’t the only things that define Phillips. The forces that keep a school like Phillips poor and Black, and without the money it needs to fight systemic racism and generational poverty don’t define us either. The challenges are vast and deep, but inside a school that people often dismiss are bright and unique students who want to make a difference.

I want to go to Columbia University, become a doctor, and work to lower maternal mortality rates among Black women. One of my classmates, Damien, a star high school football player, wants to work in real estate so he can build the kind of affordable housing he wishes he had access to growing up. Another Phillips student, Raheema, wants to go to business school and become a role model for the next generation of Black children.

When you think of Phillips, I hope you think of students like Damien, Raheema, and me. I hope you’ll think of the student I tutor. I hope you think of all of the students — those who are college-bound and those who are not on track to earn a diploma. Think of us, who we are becoming, and who we could be if we all had what we needed to thrive.

Ajibola Elizabeth Junaid is a senior at Wendell Phillips Academy High School in Chicago. She is a Student Voices Fellow at Chalkbeat.

Madeline Morgan fought to teach Black history in schools. 80 years on, her vision is not yet realized.

2022-02-04T12:00:00+00:00

“...we still haven’t got all our rights, and that’s that.”

The words were written by Louis Brown,* a Black eighth grader at Emerson Elementary in Chicago. I first read them in late 2020, against a backdrop formed by the racial and economic inequities exposed by the pandemic, the seemingly daily drumbeat of police killings, and the surging protest movement for Black Lives. They struck me in their rawness, their immediacy. Brown, however, had written his words in the spring of 1943, sitting at a desk in school that had long since been shuttered.

I was reading his work in the archives of the George Cleveland Hall Branch Library and its Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, where much of the city’s African American past is preserved. As a historian of education, finding the voices of students in historical archives is rare. When those voices speak to the present in ways that collapse the distance of nearly 80 years, it is even more remarkable.

Michael Hines

Brown’s statement about what the nation owed its Black citizens, and the still unpaid nature of that debt, was sparked by the introduction of a pioneering Black history curriculum at his school. Called the Supplementary Units for the Course of Instruction in Social Studies, it was adopted and used in Chicago schools between 1942 and 1945.

Back when most social studies texts marginalized or ignored Black Americans as a matter of course, the Supplementary Units were a groundbreaking contrast. Lessons included material on West Africa and its connection to the Black diaspora; honest accounts of the brutality of the slave trade; information on slave revolts, abolitionism, and Black military service during the Civil War; and descriptions of the accomplishments of Black artists, intellectuals, explorers, and inventors.

The lessons prompted students to think deeply and critically about Black history and about American history more broadly. Oftentimes those discussions also led to questions about the present, especially as the U.S. championed democracy on the battlefields of Europe while continuing to tolerate Jim Crow laws, lynching, restrictive covenants, a segregated military, and separate schools at home.

The Supplementary Units and their author, Madeline Morgan (later Madeline Stratton Morris) are the subject of my forthcoming book, “A Worthy Piece of Work: The Untold Story of Madeline Morgan and the Fight For Black History in Schools.” In it, I follow Morgan from her childhood in Bronzeville, the beating heart of Chicago’s Black intellectual and cultural scene, through her education at Chicago Normal College (now Chicago State University) and Northwestern University, and into the classroom, where she began the push for Black representation. Her efforts ultimately manifested in the Supplementary Units.

Black women often remain unacknowledged in the history of American education. Yet their contributions are beyond dispute.

Along the way, I look at Morgan alongside other Black women educators. Black women often remain unacknowledged in the history of American education. Yet their contributions both as theorists and practitioners are beyond dispute. From the antebellum era on, Black women worked as school teachers and administrators, community activists and social workers, librarians, and archivists. They were knit together nationally through women’s clubs, civil rights organizations, and sororities. Morgan’s story is, in many respects, the story of these women and the networks that supported and sustained their educational activism.

The book also traces the historical moment that allowed Morgan to campaign so successfully for the inclusion of Black history in schools. World War II exposed the contradictions inherent in America’s claim to be the defender of freedom and equality. At the same time, it increased Black militancy in the fight for Civil Rights. Black Americans became committed to a Double Victory over the enemies of democracy, both foreign and domestic. Black teachers and their progressive white allies pushed for intercultural education, an early form of what we now think of as multiculturalism. Several cities and school districts took up these efforts during the war years. It was at this time that Morgan convinced Chicago school officials to back her creation of a Black history curriculum. Leaving the classroom for the district’s central office, she researched, wrote, compiled, and tested the materials for over a year.

Morgan’s curriculum received national attention, wide interest, and public praise. But it was short-lived. As the war ended and national priorities shifted, interculturalism and diversity efforts fell out of favor among white educators. Black teachers, meanwhile, faced increasing barriers to teaching Morgan’s Supplementary Units.

By the late 1940s, Cold War conservatism reigned, and Morgan’s work was largely abandoned. But her call to reframe how schools taught history by including Black voices could not be denied. It has resurfaced again and again, decade after decade. It lives today in the demands of organizations like Black Lives Matter at School, which echoes Morgan’s call to make Black history a central part of the school curriculum.

At a moment when conservative attacks on Critical Race Theory have turned school board meetings into open melees, governors have passed laws encouraging parents to report educators who teach about racism and discrimination, and history standards committees are forced to fear for their physical safety, Morgan’s legacy is more relevant than ever. For me, the current effort to police how our collective past is taught and understood shows just how far we still have to go to make Morgan’s vision a reality.

For Morgan, an honest account of the nation’s past was a critical step towards full citizenship for Black Americans. That we are still fighting for such histories is a reminder that, as Louis Brown put it, “we still haven’t got all our rights, and that’s that.”

*the student’s name has been replaced with a pseudonym.

Michael Hines is an assistant professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and a former K-12 history teacher. His first book, “A Worthy Piece of Work: The Untold Story of Madeline Morgan and the Fight for Black History in Schools” is available for preorder now and will be released May 17, 2022.

CRT Map: Efforts to restrict teaching racism and bias have multiplied across the U.S.

2022-02-02T00:20:54+00:00

Officials nationwide have raced to enact new laws and introduce new policies meant to shape how students discuss the nation’s past — and its present. Many of these efforts have attempted to ban critical race theory, an academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism.

In some states, lawmakers have tried to restrict antiracism training or the teaching of what they call “divisive concepts.” But on the opposite end, other states are adding ethnic studies courses or incorporating more about people of color into their learning standards.

The map you see here depicts the depth and breadth of these ongoing efforts to both restrict and expand how a core aspect of American life is taught in our classrooms. So far, at least 36 states have adopted or introduced laws or policies that restrict teaching about race and racism. With 2022 state legislative sessions underway, new legislation is in the pipeline.

Our map also documents actions taken by state boards of education and executive branches of state governments. In states that haven’t taken such concrete steps, we have spotlighted comments from public officials and other developments to give readers a sense of how the debate is playing out.

The impact of these discussions on classrooms is being felt. This map provides a snapshot of this turning point in American history and education. We’ve also created a timeline of key events and documents that trace the critical race theory backlash from its beginnings during the administration of President Donald Trump.

Chalkbeat is committed to continued coverage of these actions. If you have information about bills, policies, or anything else relevant from your state or hometown, please email us at tips@chalkbeat.org.

Reporting by Cathryn Stout and graphics by Thomas Wilburn.

Download the data

The Asian history I never learned in school

2022-01-31T13:00:00+00:00

In elementary school, I noticed that my white teachers favored white students. They were first to be picked as class monitors, and their behavior was more likely to be excused when they bullied other children.

In toy stores, my sister and I looked at rows and rows of white dolls, wondering why none of the toys looked like us. There was little about people of color in my history classes. Instead, many lessons seemed to glorify white people and their achievements. Christopher Columbus was celebrated for “discovering” America. That he was responsible for the deaths of so many was essentially ignored.

In fifth grade, we learned about the atrocities of the Holocaust, and when I told my mother that’s what we were studying, she told me I should also know about the horrors of the Nanjing Massacre; that’s when the Imperial Japanese in Nanjing, China, in 1937 and 1938, killed hundreds of thousands of people — soldiers and civilians alike. This event is also known as the Rape of Nanjing because Japanese troops also sexually assaulted tens of thousands of women there.

I wondered why that wasn’t also taught in school.

Despite what I learned — and what was omitted — in school, at home, I felt proud and special to be Asian. I loved our traditional foods like steamed bao, noodle soups, and scallion pancakes. I adored the Chinese song competition show “Singer.” My mom had my sister and me watch Chinese movies, which was a fun way to learn more Cantonese.

On Lunar New Year, we had an elaborate dinner at my grandma’s house, and she gave out red envelopes filled with money. When my sister and I were younger, we wore our qipao, traditional Chinese dresses decorated with floral patterns. Mine was silvery pink with a swan design.

During the Mid-Autumn Festival, we ate mooncakes for dessert. I like the lotus flavor, and my mom likes them with a variety of nuts. Then we peered out the window into the dark sky and gazed at the moon.

But away from home, when I was out in the world, I often felt inferior. It wasn’t until I started high school amid COVID-19 lockdowns that my perspective changed.

While I was at home with my family, we went on weekend hikes in the Palisades, Pyramid Mountain, and Buttermilk Falls, New Jersey, autumn leaves crunching beneath our feet. It was fun to spend time with my mom and sister and, especially, my dad.

Being more steeped in my culture every day made me proud to be Chinese.

He was working from home during the lockdown, and we talked more than usual. I learned that he grew up in South Vietnam, among other ethnic Chinese. He traveled on the back of his dad’s Vespa to Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and visited a beach that had black sand. He described the common street food he loved, such as pineapple and chili peppers.

In the evenings, we played mahjong — a traditional Chinese tile game my grandma and dad taught me. As we played, my grandma told me stories about my grandpa. He owned his own jewelry shop in Saigon where he crafted gold rings by hand.

I also spent time in my grandma’s kitchen, where she taught me how to make delicious traditional Chinese dishes, such as steamed fish and long-simmered soups. I started speaking Cantonese more to communicate with her during these special evenings.

Learning about my family’s history and being more steeped in my culture every day made me proud to be Chinese. I no felt longer inferior. As I began to feel more comfortable with myself, I started to think more about racist comments made to me. I thought back to my eighth grade history class when we were briefly learning about China during World War II, and someone whispered to their friend, “Don’t they eat cats and dogs over there?” This comment felt degrading to me. And when I was in elementary school, I remember a friend teaching me a handshake game that included a chant, “Chinese, Japanese,” and the hand motion that went along with those words involved pulling the corners of your eyes up and down. Many racist comments are often deemed “jokes” and woven into American culture, but they undermine racial minorities.

I also began paying attention to how Asians were being broadly targeted, often violently, in American society. Since the start of the pandemic, hate crimes against Asian Americans have skyrocketed. Hate crimes against people of Asian descent rose by 76% in 2020, according to the FBI. My friend’s aunt, who is Chinese, was punched on the subway. News of anti-Asian attacks stirred up lots of fear about whether it was safe for my family and me to go out; we worried about being attacked.

I also researched and learned that racism against Asians in America is nothing new. For instance, the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed in 1882, prohibited Chinese immigrants from entering the United States. This law resulted from white Americans spreading xenophobic propaganda against Chinese people to keep them out of San Francisco.

Racism was also a root cause behind Japanese American internment camps, set up here during World War II. About 120,000 Japanese Americans were placed in these isolation camps because the U.S. government feared that they could be spies for the Japanese government. “We want to keep this a white man’s country,” Idaho’s Attorney General Bert Miller said at the time. “All Japanese [should] be put in concentration camps for the remainder of the war.”

Spending time with my family during quarantine and learning about these historical events — events skipped or glossed over in school — made me proud to be Asian American. Our stories deserve to be shared and recognized. I am happy to be who I am.

A version of this essay first appeared on Youth Communication.

Vienna Du enjoys expressing herself through writing and started her school’s online school paper. Vienna is passionate about creating artwork, traveling, and spending time outdoors with her friends and family.

Tennessee lawmakers file bill targeting ‘obscene’ books in school libraries

2022-01-28T23:58:44+00:00

Two Tennessee lawmakers have filed a bill aimed at purging books and other materials deemed “obscene or harmful to minors” from school libraries.

But several of the professional groups representing librarians across the state say districts already have processes in place to reconsider textbooks and materials that are flagged as objectionable.

“We feel that current school district board policies, when followed, adequately address concerns raised by parents or guardians about books,” said a Friday statement from the Tennessee Association of School Librarians.

The bill, filed this week by Republican Rep. Scott Cepicky of Culleoka and Sen. Joey Hensley of Hohenwald, would apply to public schools, including charter schools.

The proposal comes amid a national wave of book challenges, especially in politically conservative states like Tennessee, where individuals or groups are seeking to remove or restrict access to children’s and young adult books that they say contain pornography or other content deemed unwholesome.

Federal law strictly prohibits distribution of obscene material to minors.

In Texas and South Carolina, Republican governors have called for action against “obscene” content in school libraries, while school leaders in Missouri, Virginia, and Florida have pulled materials, including some award-winning books, after receiving complaints over a range of concerns.

Tennessee is a growing hotbed of complaints.

Earlier this month in East Tennessee, McMinn County’s school board voted to remove “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its required reading list for eighth-graders. Minutes of the Jan. 10 meeting cited “inappropriate language” and an illustration of a nude woman.

Moms for Liberty, a conservative nonprofit group that originated in Florida, has targeted materials through its local chapter in Williamson County, near Nashville. Members of that group have used the public comment period of recent school board meetings to read excerpts they found objectionable.

And, John Rich, a well-known country music singer and conservative activist with a large Twitter following, tweeted about meeting this month with Gov. Bill Lee and Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn to discuss materials “that our kids are being exposed to containing obscene and pornographic content.”

Cepicky declined Friday to comment about his bill, which has 22 co-sponsors in the House. Hensley did not respond to a request for an interview.

Rep. Vincent Dixie, who chairs the House Democratic Caucus and sits on several education committees, mentioned the bubbling issue Friday when delivering an online speech for his party in advance of the governor’s State of the State address on Monday.

“Instead of fighting over which books can be in the library, let’s fight to provide every classroom with high-quality books and materials their students need to learn,” said Dixie, of Nashville.

A key question is how to define what materials cross the line.

“Even the Supreme Court has had trouble defining what obscenity is and, if the Supreme Court struggles with this, then the school boards statewide will have even more trouble,” said Mark Finchum, executive director of the Tennessee Council for the Social Studies, which represents social studies teachers across the state.

The push to ban books in America also targets many materials that affront conservative sensibilities regarding race and gender.

Last spring, Tennessee lawmakers passed legislation to prohibit classroom discussion in public schools about certain concepts about race and structural racism. And many of the books being removed from curricula deal with race, according to the list of the 10 most challenged books compiled by the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

Another Republican bill, which was filed last year and is still alive, seeks to limit which supplemental teaching materials can be used in the classroom.

Last fall, three key Tennessee library organizations criticized censorship of books in school libraries.

“We oppose censorship within school libraries on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and contrary to the professional ethics of librarianship,” said a statement from the Tennessee Association of School Librarians, the Tennessee Library Association, and Friends of the Tennessee Libraries.

“Every book is not for every reader, but every child should have access to books they may want to read,” last fall’s statement said.

Erika Long, a Nashville school librarian and past president of the Tennessee Library Association, said this week that the groups issued the statement to respond to “the increasing number of challenges and bans happening across the country.”

“We wanted to make sure we addressed what is happening,” she said.

The bill filed this week cites a section of a Tennessee obscenity law that defines material “harmful to minors” as “that quality of any description or representation, in whatever form, of nudity, sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence or sadomasochistic abuse when the matter or performance:

(A) Would be found by the average person applying contemporary community standards to appeal predominantly to the prurient, shameful or morbid interests of minors;

(B) Is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable for minors; and

(C) Taken as whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific values for minors.”

You can track the legislation here.

I teach U.S. history. We can trust our kids to hear hard things.

2022-01-26T13:00:00+00:00

I am a public school social studies teacher in Northern California. My job is sometimes terrifying in scope: teach the state standards, which cover everything from early man to the present day, to 87 students who range in age from 11 to 14.

I’ve struggled with how to present the entire history of humankind in a way that is both interesting and digestible. Over the years I have become better at it, focusing in sixth grade on how societies are formed and in seventh grade on the rise and fall of empires. In eighth grade, I am confronted with U.S. history, which in the age of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, I feel enormous pressure to teach with both accuracy and sensitivity.

Katherine Sanford

When I was in school, we were taught that Columbus was a hero who discovered America and that the Pilgrims and the “Indians” shared friendly meals and culture. I was taught that the Civil War had to do with states’ rights, and that slavery, while bad, was a brief moment that was now behind us. I remember hearing about the suffering of Irish and Italian immigrants but never about the Chinese Exclusion Act or Japanese internment camps.

Those are obvious distortions, omissions, and discredited interpretations. But other key pieces of history are more complicated to determine how to teach, especially to middle schoolers. Do we get into Lincoln’s web of motivations for freeing enslaved people? FDR’s failure to stop the slaughter of Europe’s Jews alongside his efforts to rebuild the U.S. from the Great Depression?

I have learned over the past five years that there is no easy way to teach our history. It’s messy. It’s complicated. Heroes are often also flawed, and I don’t want my students to think I have all the answers. Instead, I want to teach them that the way we learn about our history is all about the questions we ask.

Teaching history can also be painful. Showing my eighth graders the tortured face of Emmett Till is the hardest day of my school year. I wish I could share his picture and say the bravery of his mother Mamie Till Mobley, who made the decision to share the mutilated face of her son on the cover of Ebony magazine, led to an end to racist violence against young people of color. But that would be a lie.

I am white, as are almost all of my students, and that makes things more complicated in other ways. Here in the hills of Northern California, in a community where many deeds still have restrictive covenants on them, it can feel like we are too far removed from certain parts of American history. Several years ago, when it came to my attention that some of my students were casually using the N-word and homophobic language outside of class, my concern only deepened. Black culture was a subject of fascination, but Black people were being denied their humanity.

I decided my normal teaching tactics weren’t enough. In 2019, my students and I raised money to fly from California to Georgia and Alabama. Our school is small and forever chasing dollars just to cover the basics. But parents, students, administrators, and ultimately our community came together and made it possible.

I could see on my students’ faces that they truly understood what it meant to deny someone’s humanity.

In Alabama, we visited the Rosa Parks Museum, the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the 16th Street Baptist Church. We discussed heroes both Black and white. We studied the ways in which people sacrifice for change. We stood where people died because they believed in a better world; we stood where children had been killed in a terrorist attack.

My class also had pen pals from a school in Alabama, and we met in person the day we were scheduled to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where, in 1965, peaceful civil rights marchers were viciously attacked. Many of the local kids had never been to the bridge either, so it became a shared experience, its gravity new to all of them.

I had foolishly forgotten name tags the morning that we were all due to meet, only to find that because of social media the students all recognized each other and greeted each other joyfully. Watching the students make those connections, and learn from one another, was beautiful and sometimes funny. My students learned that their counterparts liked college football as much as they loved the Golden State Warriors. And after seeing their pen pals interact with me and their teachers using “ma’am” and “sir,” my students asked me roughly one million questions about it.

The most powerful learning experiences came at museums that brought history alive. At the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, there are holograms of enslaved people in cages awaiting sale. One was calling repeatedly for her children from whom she had been separated. Several students had to walk back outside to catch their breath, and I could see on my students’ faces that they truly understood what it meant to deny someone’s humanity.

On the last day of our trip, we were in Atlanta at the National Human and Civil Rights Museum. There was a lunch counter and stools set up, and if you sat at a stool and placed your hands in a particular spot, and put on headphones, it would simulate the experience of sitting at a lunch counter while people shoved, yelled at, and harassed you. There were docents at each end of the counter and they advised the kids that if at any point it got to be too much they could remove their headphones. Many students wept silently as they sat there, the stools jostling. I watched as one student who sat for quite some time stood up and started to walk past the docent. The woman just a few years older than her gently touched her arm and asked if she wanted a hug. My student looked up and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

When we came back to school, I felt like I was teaching a completely different class of students. We held events so that the students could educate the community about what they had seen. I heard them speak with confidence and conviction about some of the most difficult parts of our history. I heard them describe the things they had seen and heard, and could see that in the re-telling they weren’t just educating the community but also connecting what they had learned to the world they lived in today.

The trip left me with this message for my community: Trust your schools and your teachers. Trust your kids to hear hard things and have hard conversations. We don’t have to agree on everything. But let us agree that we want our children to understand our real history to equip them for a better future.

Katherine Sanford is a parent and teacher in Northern California.

Ricardo Martinez remembered as ‘a warrior’ for justice in Denver schools

2022-01-26T01:12:19+00:00

Lee en español.

For three decades, Ricardo Martinez, co-founder of the advocacy group Padres & Jóvenes Unidos, helped parents and students fight racism in Denver Public Schools.

Last week, Denver lost the humble and fierce organizer. He died of a stroke and its complications, according to a written remembrance shared by his family.

“At his core, he was a warrior,” said his wife, Pam Martinez, the organization’s co-founder. “At his core, he unquestionably believed in the basic democratic rights of all people.”

The organization helped parents and students take on issues ranging from discipline reform to biased school principals. Martinez was also active on the state and national levels on education and fighting for immigrant rights.

Though much of his work was focused on the Chicano and Mexican communities, his wife said he applied that same gentleness, commitment, and passion “for all oppressed peoples.”

Ricardo Martinez, 69, retired in 2019 from Padres & Jóvenes Unidos, which recently changed its name but retains a similar mission.

“He didn’t just fight for Latino students,” said Denver City Clerk Paul López, who first met Martinez in his youth. “He fought for every student, for everybody’s access to an equal education, regardless of where you were from or what language you spoke.”

Ricardo Martinez (left) with former Denver Mayor Federico Peña at a march for immigrant rights in Denver in May 2006.

Martinez grew up in Southern California, the son of farmworkers, said Pam Martinez. When he was old enough, he worked alongside them in the fields and canneries. As teenagers, Martinez and his sister would take the bus from town to town delivering newspapers put out by the United Farm Workers union and the political party La Raza Unida.

Martinez eventually joined both the union and the party, and became active in the anti-war movement, she said. The Martinezes met on a picket line and moved to Denver in 1982 as young parents. About a decade later, when Ricardo Martinez was working as a labor union organizer, they got a call from parents at Denver’s Valverde Elementary about a principal who was punishing students for speaking Spanish.

The Martinezes helped the parents successfully push for changes at the school. At a celebration of the parents’ victory, Pam Martinez recalled, one Valverde father suggested they keep the organization going — and what was then called Padres Unidos was born.

Over the next 30 years, the organization pressed Denver Public Schools on important issues from preserving bilingual education and improving the quality of school lunches to reducing suspensions and expulsions, which disproportionately affect Black and Latino students.

Padres & Jóvenes Unidos was instrumental in opening a bilingual Montessori elementary school in northwest Denver, Academia Ana Marie Sandoval, and in bringing about reforms at other city schools, including North High School and the former Cole Middle School.

A 2008 overhaul of Denver Public Schools’ discipline policy to reduce suspensions, expulsions, and police referrals was largely the result of years of organizing by Padres & Jóvenes Unidos, which worked with the district to shape the reforms.

“They were bulldogs, and they were not going to let that go,” said Theresa Peña, who was president of the school board at the time. “Where there was compromise, they got 85% of what they brought to the table because they were right.”

Alex Sánchez worked for Denver Public Schools and now runs an advocacy organization, Voces Unidas de las Montañas, in Glenwood Springs. He remembers Martinez as a tireless advocate who was “one of the best in terms of movement building.”

“I have a vivid memory of being at a table with Ricardo when he was challenging the school district when a principal suspended several students because they were wearing a Mexican flag,” Sánchez said. “Ricardo, parents, and youth came to the table and demanded accountability, as they should have, of that principal and the school system.”

Ricardo and Pam Martinez pose for a portrait in 2005.

Although the Martinezes led the organization, it was always their approach to empower parents and students to speak for themselves, observers said.

“A true organizer isn’t in the front chasing cameras or headlines,” López said. “A true organizer gets behind and pushes. … And he did that.”

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, superintendent of Denver Public Schools from 2005 to 2008, said Martinez forever changed the way the city serves its children of color by always making sure students and families were at the forefront of the movement.

“They organized, rallied, and took to the podium to demand justice and academic opportunity,” Bennet said in a statement. “They forged lasting changes in Denver’s neighborhoods and schools. And through their many accomplishments, Ricardo’s legacy will endure.”

Pam Martinez said it was his love for justice and empowering others that drove his work.

“He loved watching people get their consciousness,” she said. “He loved people overcoming fear and turning it into strength and power. He loved seeing the whole community become alive.”

I lead classroom conversations about race. But I need more help.

2022-01-18T21:41:29+00:00

This school year, my eighth grade students took part in two very different conversations mere days apart – one focused on how the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict reinforced so much of what is broken in our country, and the other focused on justice finally being served against Ahmaud Arbery’s killers.

My students wanted to talk more about the hatred that fuels violence and the role of cell phone video in decisions to acquit or convict. I did my best to facilitate meaningful dialogue in both cases, knowing the immense weight on young people in these moments and the equally great responsibility I hold as their educator.

Dr. Winnie Williams-Hall

As a Black woman teaching in Chicago Public Schools for more than 25 years, I’ve spent plenty of time considering how my race impacts my work. But no matter their race, gender, or identity, all educators need to be able to stand in front of our classrooms, gain the trust of our students, and empathize with them.

My years in front of the classroom have taught me that students don’t need our sympathy, but they do need our empathy and action. Although the stakes are higher than ever, educators aren’t being given what we need to navigate the most difficult conversations of our day. Sure, we’ll get the occasional lesson plan, but what we need is in-depth, ongoing, and mandatory training and curriculum about identity, race, and racism. Resources must be devoted to making that a reality.

Instead, it’s been up to teachers to foster a classroom that is responsive to our students’ experiences. Instead of avoiding uncomfortable conversations about history, I work every day to make my classroom a space where students can have open, honest dialogue on topics ranging from police brutality to the recent verdicts. I want them to know that my classroom is a safe place, physically and emotionally, and somewhere their voices are valued. It’s a place where current events can be discussed with nuance, even when it’s uncomfortable.

I try to honor my students’ lived experiences. If a child talks back, for example, I work to understand the root causes of their behavior. If a student is disengaged, I am sure to ask them about what’s going on in their lives and do my best to provide the support they need.

But I need more help than I’m getting. The district and our union need to step up to make widespread training available now. How can we expect educators to help students navigate racial complexities if they are not given the tools to unpack and understand what’s at issue?

There is repeated trauma, especially for our students of color, when we have to address these kinds of events repeatedly. If we facilitate these conversations well, we stand to build a level of trust and empathy with our students that will transform our ability to teach them. If we don’t, we stand to lead classrooms that don’t feel safe for all of our students. Good intentions aside, we could exacerbate their trauma.

Although the stakes are higher than ever, educators aren’t being given what we need to navigate the most difficult conversations of our day.

It’s been said time and again that the pandemic and the racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd have laid bare what so many of us teaching in classrooms have known for decades: Our school system is built atop an inequitable, racist foundation. In Chicago Public Schools, we teach students with incredibly diverse backgrounds, all of whom are impacted by longstanding and intersecting systems that reinforce racism and poverty. Dismantling those systems will take time and effort.

Knowing this, I’ve long been an advocate for widespread and ongoing educator training around topics such as identity, implicit bias, trauma, and antiracism. In the past year and a half, there’s been a lot of talk about the importance of these practices in our schools. While I’m glad our district and our union can agree on their importance, I’m imploring them to move past agreement and into action so that educators will no longer scramble to address the critical events and conversations that are shaping our students’ lives.

Dr. Winnie Williams-Hall is a diverse learning middle school teacher at Nicholson STEM Elementary. Dr. Winnie has been working in Chicago Public Schools for over 25 years.

Indiana educators: How would proposed restrictions on teaching about race and identity affect your classroom?

2022-01-07T14:45:00+00:00

Indiana lawmakers have introduced a bill that would restrict what teachers can teach about race and racism, as well as what schools can mandate as part of diversity and equity training.

It would also require schools to post curriculum materials online, involve parents in the curriculum selection process, and obtain parent permission for mental health services for their children.

The proposal would create a process for parents to file a complaint, beginning with speaking to the school principal and allowing for potential civil litigation.

The bill would ban teaching concepts that suggest students of one race bear responsibility for past actions against those of another race; or that cause feelings of guilt or anguish among students.

Chalkbeat wants to hear from Indiana educators: How would this proposed legislation affect you? What are your most pressing questions and concerns? Let us know in the survey below.

If you are having trouble viewing this form, go here.

I am a school board member. Anti-CRT bills are stoking fear in our district.

2022-01-07T13:00:00+00:00

Following an email exchange about serving on the school board, my cousin sent me an editorial cartoon from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution showing soldiers lined up behind flags for battle — one group behind the American flag and one behind the Confederate flag. There is a man standing in between them saying: “Ok folks, today we are gonna reenact a school board meeting …”

At the time she sent it, my cousin was alluding to divisive school board-level fights over masks and vaccines. But more recently I worry that our country is actually dividing itself.

Erika Cohen

In Southern New Hampshire, where I live and chair the Derry school board, recent and proposed laws have landed us a lot of national attention. Last spring, the state legislature passed a law as part of the state budget limiting the teaching of so-called divisive concepts. Specifically, it forbids educators from teaching that one group of people is inherently inferior or superior to another, or inherently racist or sexist.

When it passed, I talked to parents who were fearful that teaching about racism, and the free exchange of ideas in the classroom, could be misconstrued as violating the law, which would lead teachers to be wary. The board also faced questions from community members about a social studies teacher who took a grant-paid sabbatical and studied diversity, equity and how bias impacts teaching and learning. Some community members accused her of teaching critical race theory, which was not the case.

These fears were further stoked this fall. In November, the New Hampshire Department of Education launched a webpage for parents to lodge complaints against teachers who breach the divisive concepts law, and the state chapter of Moms for Liberty announced a $500 reward for the first person to catch a public school teacher violating the law. In response to a question on Twitter about how to contribute, people were told to donate with a note that says, “CRT Bounty,” referring to critical race theory.

I was livid and terrified. I worried that a vague law that seemed aimed at limiting the scope of classroom conversation, followed by a bounty watch, would lead teachers to shy away from difficult discussions about history, racism, and sexism. Most of all, I worried that avoiding those topics could lead our kids, most of whom are very accepting of differences, to learn that certain things shouldn’t be discussed. This troubled me because I see my job as a board member to help kids grow into thoughtful, knowledgeable and well-rounded adults.

The state chapter of Moms for Liberty announced a $500 reward for the first person to catch a public school teacher violating the law.

I first heard the term critical race theory when it came up in a question during a school board election forum last March. Since then, it has been used at school board meetings as a catchall among those who want to ban references in school to Black Lives Matter, social justice movements, and white privilege. The term has morphed from one used for a framework of legal and academic topics, primarily discussed at the college level, into a rallying cry for those looking to limit discussions about racism.

That transformation was concerning — not because parents don’t have the right to share their views and concerns with their school board, but because the content of their concerns seemed divorced from the reality of the teaching happening in our district. The teacher who took a sabbatical started a culture club and presented with students at a board meeting. The students talked about learning to consider opinions very different then their own and to celebrate differences instead of judging them. To me, this sounded like the kind of learning I wanted to see.

To be clear, our schools in Derry don’t teach critical race theory. What we do teach is history and current events. Some of that might make students uncomfortable, but I trust our educators to navigate that in a way that makes all students feel safe and valued.

I was still mulling what to do with my anger about the so-called bounty when I read yet another piece of proposed state legislation — an amendment to a 1949 law prohibiting teachers from promoting communism. If passed, it would restrict how U.S. history and racism can be discussed in school and says: “No teacher shall advocate any doctrine or theory promoting a negative account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America in New Hampshire public schools.”

That means that within the course of about a year we somehow went from not making students feel racist, which we don’t, to denying truths of our founding. Under this law, how do you discuss the three-fifths compromise, which counted enslaved Black people as equal to three-fifths of a white person? How do you discuss the history of voting rights and voter suppression? How do you discuss recent killings of unarmed Black people? This is our history; this is our present.

As a school board member, I generally stay out of politics. I find it best to stay focused on the work of policy, budgets and overseeing the running of the district, which includes high-level decisions about curriculum. But I am compelled to speak about this. And so are our teachers. Two different teachers unions representing New Hampshire educators filed lawsuits last month alleging the laws are having a chilling effect on classroom discussions.

Everyone is not racist, but racism — interpersonal and systemic — does exist. We need to discuss it and understand it, so it is not our future.

Erika Cohen is in her sixth year on the Derry School Board and currently serves as chair. She has two children, a sixth grader and a ninth grader, in the Derry schools. Erika works as an independent writer, editor, and ghostwriter.

Tennessee study: Blacks, males score lower in teacher observations

2022-01-03T22:28:40+00:00

Black and male teachers in Tennessee have received lower classroom observation scores than their white and female peers every year since the state launched its teacher evaluation system in 2011, says a new study.

The same gaps show up even when comparing similarly qualified teachers whose students achieve similar test score gains.

The findings, released Monday and mirroring national research, raise important questions about the reliability and fairness of the state’s teacher evaluation system. They also highlight concerns that the observation experiences could drive Black and male teachers out of the profession at a time when Tennessee seeks to diversify its teacher workforce.

Tennessee was among the first states to adopt comprehensive teacher evaluations to help educators and schools improve as part of state and national reforms. The high-stakes results inform decisions by school administrators about compensation, retention, and other personnel matters.

Classroom observation scores are the most important component and comprise up to 70% of a teacher’s final score, which also incorporates student achievement data. The resulting rating of 1 to 5 aims to gauge a teacher’s level of effectiveness, with 5 being the most effective.

The system has always been controversial, especially Tennessee’s early use of student test data to help rate teachers. More recent attention has focused on the quality of classroom observations.

“We want observation scores to give accurate information about teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom and not to reflect other factors beyond the teacher’s control,” said Jason A. Grissom, one of the authors of the new study from the Tennessee Education Research Alliance, a partnership of Vanderbilt University and the Tennessee Department of Education.

The president of the state’s largest teacher organization said the data isn’t surprising.

“This should force a much-needed conversation about unconscious bias in our evaluation system,” said Beth Brown of the Tennessee Education Association, which has called for an annual review.

The study offers few clues on what’s driving the gender gap in observation scores. However, the magnitude of the race gap is influenced by several factors, including the racial composition of the school’s faculty, differing characteristics of students who are assigned to Black and white teachers, and the race of the teacher’s observer.

Black teachers receive slightly lower ratings from white evaluators, and the gaps are larger in schools where a Black teacher has fewer Black colleagues.

Also, the study found that Black teachers are assigned higher numbers of students with a history of disciplinary problems, lower attendance, and lower achievement.

A national study in 2018 found similar results and suggested that evaluations are one reason teachers may be deterred from working in classrooms where students lag farthest behind. It also raised questions about whether teachers of color — who often work most frequently with students of color — are getting a fair shot, especially when a growing body of research shows that a racially and ethnically diverse teaching force can have positive impacts academically, socially, and emotionally on students of all races.

This school year, Tennessee began requiring school districts to set goals and strategies to get more teachers of color in front of students. The new policy prompted the research alliance to dig deeper into observation score data broken down by race and gender.

“As we work to increase teacher diversity in Tennessee, it is critical that we understand more about the causes of these systematic differences so we can begin to address them,” said Erin O’Hara, the alliance’s executive director. “Are there potential changes needed in the observation rubrics, for example, or in training of evaluators?”

Tennessee trains mostly school principals and assistant principals to observe and score their teachers. A state-approved scoring guide focuses on instruction, planning, professionalism, and classroom environment.

The researchers say school leaders should receive regular training on potential sources of biases in their teacher evaluations. They also recommend administrators examine school-level data on student placement to guard against systematically assigning lower-achieving students and those with disciplinary challenges to Black educators.

Chicago students walk out of South Side school over racial slurs: ‘We will not be silenced’

2021-12-14T20:16:28+00:00

A dozen students trickled out the front doors of Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy at 10:45 a.m. Monday. Before long, the group swelled to about 50 students chanting in unison: “We will not be silenced.”

Some Black students at the Ashburn campus say that, for years, they have notified teachers, administrators, and security guards that students are using racial slurs on campus. Those concerns have largely been ignored or dismissed as a joke, they said.

The walkout served as a way to call attention to what students said was a culture of unchecked racism at the school, which is 61% Latino and 37% Black, with 2% of students identifying with other races, said senior Kendall Canteberry, one of the organizers of the walkout.

The student protest came amid increasing national scrutiny over the way conversations on race are handled in classrooms and schools. It also comes six months after the district said it was working to build an anti-bias culture at its campuses but has not fully detailed its plans.

In addition to saying they have endured racial slurs from other students, Black students alleged they have been targeted by some teachers who kicked them out of class or called security on them, Canteberry said. The student said a number of Black teachers have left the school over the past four years.

According to state report card data, Goode has had some turnover over the last few years, which was in line with districtwide numbers.

In 2018, 131 students at Goode received out-of-school suspensions. Black students accounted for 68% of the suspensions, compared with 24% for Latino students, according to a ProPublica analysis of disciplinary data collected by the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights.

Goode STEM Principal Armando Rodriguez deferred questions to Chicago Public Schools. Chicago Public Schools didn’t respond to specific questions from Chalkbeat but shared a letter sent Tuesday morning to parents and students at the school. The district did not respond to specific allegations made by students.

In the letter, Chicago Public Schools acknowledged the student-led effort aimed at “creating equitable learning conditions” for students and staff, “especially students of color and students from other marginalized backgrounds.”

“We recognize and appreciate the students and staff at Goode who are working to bring attention to these issues, and we are committed to working with the Goode community to address students’ concerns and work toward a common goal of creating a safe and equitable school community,” the district wrote in the letter.

Monday’s nearly 20-minute walkout comes amid mounting frustrations of inaction from administration to address the persistent complaints, Canteberry said.

“Regardless of how many times we report it, nothing has changed,” the 17-year-old senior said. “They always say the same thing: ‘Changes will be made soon.’”

“We are tired of the racism,” he said, “tired of how we are being treated as students.”

Another student organizer, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, said the walkout was aimed at calling out “prejudice and racism” at the school.

In the letter to the Goode parents, Chicago Public Schools said it planned to establish a Student Voice Committee, develop a social-emotional learning plan, and co-design a racial healing plan at the school. The district also plans to host community meetings to help develop goals around cultural responsiveness, anti-racism, and anti-bias at Goode.

Chicago Public Schools has been actively encouraging conversations about race in its classrooms.

Following the Breonna Taylor shooting death by police, Janice Jackson, CPS’s former CEO, sent a citywide letter encouraging school communities to have “honest and productive conversations about racial justice and our role in fighting systemic racism.”

The walkout comes on the heels of a district announcement earlier this year that Chicago intended to build a system to report incidents of racism and bias. The program Transforming Bias-Based Harm aims to focus on non-disciplinary solutions and school-level training for students and staff to recognize implicit bias and microaggressions.

Under the plan, the district would also investigate more serious instances of racism.

The district announced the system after students at some selective enrollment high schools began using social media to document alleged incidents of racism at their schools, which they said included racial slurs, bullying, and racial profiling by school security officers.

District officials previously said students and families are able to start reporting incidents of perceived bias on the CPS website or by emailing civilrights@cps.edu.

Tina Curry, a teacher and former equity coach at Sarah E. Goode, said issues at the school stem from “bias that goes unchecked.”

“It doesn’t start as racism,” Curry said. “When bias goes unchecked, it can turn into discrimination and racism. That’s been the problem here.”

Curry used to teach an activism unit in her class during which Black students shared experiences of being barred from using the restroom or being locked out of class after the bell, as well as experiencing racism at the school.

Black students have said they see their peers being treated differently, Curry said, describing instances where Black students would be singled out and disciplined differently.

Curry said these disciplinary practices targeting Black students were going “unchecked” at the school and “our children are the ones who are suffering, especially our Black children, especially our Black girls.”

“They are punished more harshly for the same offense than their Latino peers,” Curry said. “And Black students see this.”

Students started petitions and surveys and raised concerns with administration but nothing has changed, Curry said.

In response, administrators canceled the activism program for the semester and later reinstated it after student pushback, Curry said.

Curry said the initial move to remove the activism program was part of a larger culture problem and microaggressions at the school that are forcing Black teachers to leave.

During school dismissal on Monday, a senior student, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, said she heard stories of peers experiencing racism from other students. She didn’t participate in the morning walkout because administrators told students there would be consequences.

Black and Latino students and Black teachers have been dealing with racism at the school for years, but students didn’t know how to move forward with their frustrations, Canteberry said.

Had the pandemic not happened, Canteberry feels as though the issue would have come to a head much earlier.

Canteberry and other organizers plan on continuing to host meetings to make sure the racism they’ve experienced gets addressed not just for current students but for students who will attend the school in the future.

“We hope that this protest and this walkout finally changes things — changes the racism — and have our voices be heard,” Canteberry said. “I really hope we can really sit down and change things for students and staff to be happy.”

Sheriff’s deputies to remain in Shelby County Schools after board approves controversial contract

2021-12-01T03:49:51+00:00

After months of tense community debate, the Memphis school board voted to keep sheriff’s deputies in schools and renewed its agreement with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office.

The board unanimously passed the memorandum of understanding with the Sheriff’s Office at a Tuesday evening meeting, but not before adding an amendment to address community concerns and national conversations about negative interactions between students and campus police.

Per the agreement, Shelby County Schools will pay the Sheriff’s Office $50,000 for 36 deputies who will patrol assigned schools. The district also employs about 100 of its own school resource officers who are not governed by the agreement.

This year’s memorandum includes some changes, such as an additional 16 hours of training for school-based deputies and a job description that also includes mentoring students, fostering positive relationships with law enforcement, and de-escalating conflicts rather than funneling students into the criminal justice system.

After much discussion and several public comments, the board added an amendment requiring officers to follow all board policies — including refraining from interrogating students without parental consent, a concern many students and advocates have voiced over several months.

While the rule was already a district policy, board members demanded its inclusion in the formal agreement with the Sheriff’s Office, emphasizing that they appreciated the courage it took for student advocates to speak out their frustrations with policing in schools.

Board member Stephanie Love said the memorandum must reflect concerns students have expressed after months of board debate.

“On the outside looking in, it would appear that everyone has wasted their time because it’s just a simple MOU. Why couldn’t all of that have been included?” she asked before the amendment passed.

Board member Miska Clay Bibbs said documents should outlive and detail one-on-one conversations.

“We want to ensure the document reflects all of the conversations being had,” she said.

However, the contract doesn’t address all the concerns expressed by Memphis’ grassroots Counselors Not Cops campaign.

Paul Garner, who has spearheaded the movement, called the board’s action a “huge disappointment.” He said nothing of substance changed from the district’s last agreement with the Sheriff’s Office.

“They left so many of the valid concerns that youth and advocates have been bringing up for months unaddressed,” Garner said. “Essentially, they just voted to uphold the status quo and perpetuate the school-to-prison pipeline.”

As of Tuesday evening, over 1,300 community members had written letters to board members and administrators, demanding the district end its ties with the Sheriff’s Office in order to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. The term refers to the likelihood that students of color and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds will become entangled in the criminal justice system early in life and continue that burden into adulthood because of law enforcement presence in schools.

An April Brookings Institution report found that school policing criminalizes typical adolescent behavior, escalating cutting class to a truancy charge and graffiti on bathroom walls to a vandalism charge, for example. In addition, data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights shows that school resource officers are more than twice as likely to refer Black students for prosecution compared with their white peers.

Instead of spending $50,000 to have sheriff’s deputies patrolling schools, advocates urged the board to use the funds to add more counselors, social workers, nurses, and other staff to address mental health concerns and conflict resolution in schools.

In an interview Tuesday, student Zahra Chowdhury said she was inspired to advocate to remove law enforcement from schools after a friend told her about an experience she had with a school resource officer who handcuffed her in eighth grade because she got into an argument with another student.

“Counselors and psychologists and social workers are people who know how to work with youth,” said Chowdhury, a student representative with Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope.

And more of them are needed, Chowdhury said. Fellow students often tell her that they either don’t know who their school counselor is, or they don’t feel comfortable asking overwhelmed counselors for help.

An ACLU report found that in 2015, schools in Shelby County, including other municipal districts, had 1 counselor for every 414 students — compared with the American School Counselor Association’s recommendation of 1 counselor for every 250 students.

While Superintendent Joris Ray said he, fellow administrators, and the board heard and appreciated community concerns about police in schools and increasing student mental health challenges, he highlighted the district’s recent focus on social and emotional learning.

Ray estimated the board has recently allocated about $100 million to mental health supports such as the expansion of the district’s ReSET rooms, designated classrooms for students to regroup after an argument or emotional outburst.

“I don’t think approving an MOU for $50,000 will interfere with that work,” Ray said. “I believe in keeping our students safe, and that’s not an ‘either or’ with social-emotional learning. We can do both.”

NYC is making a big investment in culturally responsive education. It benefits all of us.

2021-11-29T16:07:34+00:00

None of my teachers ever talked about families that looked like mine. None of the books at school showed families that looked like mine. The message I received was loud and clear in this silence: Don’t talk about having a gay mom. It’s not normal. It’s not accepted. School taught me to hide who I was and what I valued. In other ways, I was overly represented in the books I read and the classes I took. As a white, cisgender girl, I benefited from my privilege.

Now that I am a teacher, I work hard to create lessons — and an overall environment — that allow our young people to be seen and understood in a way that I was not. That’s why I’m so committed to what’s known as culturally responsive and sustaining education, which the New York City education department defines as “a way of seeing diversity as a source of knowledge.” It enables students to “learn using aspects of their race, social class, gender, language, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or ability.”

Amy Parker

In our fifth grade class, we used a CRSE lens during an informational reading and writing unit. We encouraged students to choose issues they care about, research those issues, and write about them. One student wanted a group to study Hispanic and Latinx rights. “Why don’t we learn more about Hispanics?” the student asked me. “I feel like we need to learn more about that because I am Hispanic.”

Another student, a Black girl, responded to a survey that we should have a group that works on women’s rights. Students who identify as LGBTQ+ and those who do not joined a group that worked on LGBTQ+ history and rights. Working collectively in these small groups, students actively built on their own cultural viewpoints and identities. We discussed and shared who we are and why the issue chosen matters to us. We also encouraged others to join us in this work. For example, a student in the LGBTQ+ group started a petition for transgender rights.

We also need to examine classroom materials. In New York City, 85% of our public school students are students of color. Yet, in the city’s most commonly used K-5 curriculums, 84% of the books are written by white authors, according to NYU’s Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative.

At my school, P.S. 63 The STAR Academy in the East Village, we are lucky to have worked closely with Dr. Gholnecsar “Gholdy” Muhammad, a professor, author, and leader in culturally and historically responsive education. Teachers infuse the five pursuits Muhammad identified — Identity, Criticality, Intellect, Skill, and Joy — into our studies. For example, the second grade does “The Name Project,” where students learn about how their names are connected to their identities and who they are. For the culminating project, students share the story of their name with the help of their families and create an art piece to go with it. Doing CRSE well also means getting to know our students, families, and communities.

For all students, CRSE means seeing themselves and others in our lessons across content areas. For our students of color, it means learning their stories and histories, and connecting deeply to them while at school. For our white students, this means personal growth, deeper historical understanding, and the development of young activists.

When Nora, one of three white students in our class last year, shared in a Zoom chat that she sometimes felt guilty when learning about the true history of the United States, my co-teacher and I were able to listen and discuss her important role in ending racism and inequality. She was able to see herself as an agent of change who could work towards liberation for all people. After our check-ins, she continued to participate by asking questions, sharing her ideas, and pressing a local representative to fight for more equitable funding for our public schools.

I appreciate that Chancellor Meisha Porter and the City Council have made room in their budgets to prioritize our students, their stories, their families’ stories, and our NYC communities. Over the course of three years, almost $500 million will be allocated to CRSE so that our students are reflected in what and how they learn.

In a recent email, Chancellor Porter wrote, “Children are more engaged in class when they can see themselves in their lessons and materials,” and she is right. We need all schools to implement lesson plans that reflect, respect, and respond to New York City’s student populations. Meanwhile, educators should prioritize building strong relationships with students, families, and communities.

I can only imagine how much more understood I would have felt if I had seen my family and story represented at school as a child. I wish I had more teachers who learned who I was and what I valued, and then used those strengths to build out what and how I learned. But currently available curriculums are not often designed with racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and neurological diversity in mind. I hope that New York City’s investment will make space for all of our voices and differences to be celebrated at school.

Amy Parker is in her 12th year of teaching and currently teaches fifth grade at P.S. 63 The STAR Academy in the East Village. She is the UFT chapter leader at her school, a member of the School Leadership Team, and an active participant on her school’s Equity Team.

Tennessee nails down rules for disciplining teachers, withholding money from schools that teach banned concepts about racism

2021-11-20T00:42:56+00:00

Tennessee has bolstered the financial penalties against large school districts that violate the state’s new law regulating discussions on race and gender in the classroom.

The state also lengthened the amount of time allowed for filing a complaint against a teacher who has allegedly crossed the line, while it stuck with plans to accept complaints only from students, parents, or staff in the impacted district or charter school.

Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn signed off recently on emergency rules for regulating the teaching of prohibited topics under a law enacted this spring amid national fury from conservatives about critical race theory, an academic framework that examines how policies and laws may perpetuate systemic racism.

It’s unclear how many complaints will be filed in Tennessee under the new rules, since critical race theory is taught mostly in higher education — not K-12 schools.

The law restricts teachers from discussing 14 concepts the legislature deemed cynical or divisive. Among the concepts are that the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably sexist or racist, and that an individual is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive because of race or gender.

Schwinn promised the guidance after Gov. Bill Lee signed the law, one of dozens of state-level actions nationwide seeking to prevent educators from using critical race theory concepts and the New York Times’ 1619 Project on U.S. history.

The emergency rules, which became effective on Nov. 8, will remain in place until next May 7, when the department plans to have final rules based on lessons learned about enforcing the law this school year.

The rules nail down processes for filing and investigating complaints, appealing decisions, and levying punishment. Schwinn approved the package after her department reviewed more than 900 public comments and tweaked its proposed enforcement plan released in late July.

“Most revisions were made in response to feedback received during the public comment period, but some revisions were made to clarify misunderstandings or confusion of wording in the original draft,” said department spokesman Brian Blackley on Friday.

Some of the commenters complained that proposed penalties were excessive, both for teachers and districts that are deemed out of compliance.

But while the state removed wording about “licensure action” from the language about teacher penalties, it still allows the State Board of Education to suspend or revoke licenses after local districts take initial disciplinary action that could include firing a teacher. That’s partly because Tennessee’s Teacher Code of Conduct, which is also in state law, requires educators to “abide by all applicable federal and state laws.”

Financial penalties for districts, particularly larger ones, will be higher than under the draft rules. They’ll be based on a district or charter school’s percentage of annual state funds — 2% on the first offense, growing to 10% by the fifth offense — instead of allowing a lesser flat fee that starts at $1 million.

Rep. Scott Cepicky, a Maury County Republican who was instrumental in the law’s passage, had argued larger districts could afford the flat penalty, while forgoing a percentage of state funds would sting more.

Hundreds of commenters, especially from Williamson County, which has significant political influence in state government, asked the department to expand the definition of “eligible complainant” to include grandparents of students or even taxpayers in general. But others worried that “outside forces” who don’t have children in public schools could file unfounded complaints that will waste administrators’ time.

In the end, the state stuck with restricting eligibility to current students, parents, or employees. However, it yielded to calls for a longer window of time to file a complaint: 45 calendar days instead of the proposed 30 days from the alleged violation.

The rules place the responsibility for investigating complaints about teachers on local school systems and charter schools that “are best positioned to choose which textbooks and instructional materials meet the needs of their students, educators, and community.”

After receiving a complaint, administrators have 60 calendar days to substantiate it and take action to ensure the prohibited concept is no longer included in instruction, curriculum, or related materials. But administrators are also encouraged to work with parents, teachers, and other staff to reach an “early resolution of complaints” that halts the process.

The state education department will handle appeals and step in if a district or charter school drops the ball in the process or knowingly violates the new law.

Many Tennesseans both for and against the law complained the prohibited concepts are vague, but the rules don’t delve into those questions.

None of the legislature’s Democrats supported the Republican-backed measure, which received vocal support from the political action group Moms for Liberty. Many other organizations, including the ACLU of Tennessee and the Organization of American Historians, the nation’s largest professional organization of U.S. history scholars, voiced opposition,

U.S. News’ school rankings gain local traction, but could fuel segregation

2021-10-26T16:32:22+00:00

On Twitter, the U.S. News and World Report’s new rankings for elementary and middle schools were roundly castigated. “Truly just an appalling use of your time and expertise,” wrote one commentator. “This is terrible and will reinforce and exacerbate inequalities,” said another.

Elsewhere, the reaction was more favorable. The new metrics drew an avalanche of local news coverage listing an area’s top-ranked schools, with the rankings sometimes treated as if they came from a government source.

“New Report Reveals Best Elementary, High Schools in Illinois,” declared NBC Chicago.

Some school districts promoted the results, too. Denver Public Schools, which serves mostly low-income students of color, heralded the rankings in a newsletter: “Several elementary and middle schools in DPS have been ranked among the top in Colorado in a brand-new ranking!” Each of its top 10 schools, according to U.S. News, serves mostly white, affluent students.

The response illustrates the continued appeal of ranking systems that use test scores to sort and classify schools, despite a growing understanding that the results often mirror school demographics — potentially reinforcing and exacerbating school segregation.

Experts say U.S. News’ approach is particularly crude, and a Chalkbeat review of four states found that the rankings appear closely tied to student demographics.

“There is no way that that is a good indication of whether that school is instructionally effective or not,” said Tomás Monarrez, a researcher at the Urban Institute who studies school segregation. “It’s more noise in an already noisy environment.”

But, he said, “It’s very clear that there’s a demand for that product.”

U.S. News has long produced influential but controversial college rankings, which are a key source of revenue for the publication. It’s also ranked high schools for some time. This year, U.S. News created rankings of the country’s elementary and middle schools.

Half of a school’s score is based on the share of students who reached proficiency on state standardized tests. The other half uses the same data but compares schools to other schools that serve similar populations, by race and poverty levels. (The test scores are from 2019, the last widely available state exam data.)

Monarrez said that the overall approach is rudimentary and misleading. “Nobody that takes statistics seriously would have done something like that,” he said. A more accurate measure, researchers have long argued, would use academic growth to estimate how much schools contribute to student learning. The U.S. News rankings do not include a measure of growth or consider other factors, like attendance, safety, or diversity.

U.S. News defended its use of overall test scores with limited statistical adjustment, saying “we believe parents value environments where most children arrive prepared to learn and teachers can provide a culture of enrichment.”

Not surprisingly, U.S. News rankings do appear closely linked to student demographics.

In Colorado, all top 10 ranked elementary schools served few low-income, Black, or Hispanic students — less than 35%, and most far less. In California, a similar pattern held, with only one top-ranked school serving a significant share of those students.

In Mississippi, eight of the top 10 schools serve few Black or Hispanic students, though a number of highly ranked schools enroll significant shares of low-income students. A number of the top schools are selective programs that admit students based on their test scores.

An analysis by Aaron Pallas, a Columbia University sociologist, found that there was a strong correlation between New York City middle school rankings and family income, as well as students’ entering test scores. That suggests that the rankings are largely identifying schools already perceived to be effective.

“The U.S. News ratings provide very little useful information to anybody,” said Pallas.

U.S. News analyst Eric Brooks acknowledged that there is a correlation between the rankings and school demographics, but emphasized that there are exceptions.

“While there is a relationship between demographics and performance on state assessments, there is not a perfect correlation,” he said in a statement. “There are abundant cases where schools with greater socioeconomic diversity ranked higher than schools with lesser socioeconomic diversity.”

Brooks pointed out that in Georgia, the top-rated middle school — a selective enrollment program in Jonesboro — serves mostly low-income Black students. All the other top-ranked middle schools in the state serve far fewer children from low-income families.

Chantal Hailey, a professor at University of Texas at Austin, worries that the rankings will exacerbate — or at least affirm — existing racial biases. She’s found that white parents are reluctant to send their child to a school with a lot of Black students, even when schools have similar graduation rates and levels of safety.

Rating systems “often justify people’s racialized and class perceptions,” said Hailey.

“Parents really want to send their kids to the best school — and a lot of the forces that we have out there are pushing white parents into whiter schools.”

Research suggests that, if U.S. News’ rankings are widely used, they could lead to more racial and economic segregation in schools and in housing. One study found that when the popular rating website GreatSchools rolled out its ratings in an area, housing prices around highly rated schools increased. Those areas then drew in more white, Asian, and high-income families.

Other research has found that Florida’s state ratings drove up housing prices around schools that received an A grade, and those schools attracted more advantaged families. And in a recent survey experiment, parents were more likely to say they would move to a district with a higher share of white and high-income families after being provided data on test score proficiency.

“Parents really want to send their kids to the best school — and a lot of the forces that we have out there are pushing white parents into whiter schools,” said Shira Korn, a researcher who has studied how families choose schools.

Brooks argues that the rankings actually offer a countervailing force. “Without data-based rankings many parents may rely on heuristics like the wealth of their school districts to predict quality,” he said. “U.S. News’s rankings disrupt this by letting math and reading scores speak for themselves while adjusting for students demographics.”

Regardless, it remains an open question how much of an impact the U.S. News rankings will have, given the crowded marketplace.

GreatSchools boasts of tens of millions of annual page views, and has partnerships with real estate websites. A 2019 Chalkbeat analysis found that GreatSchools ratings were also closely tied to students’ race and income. It has since tweaked its formula to place more emphasis on student academic growth, although proficiency scores that are highly linked to demographics continue to play a role in the ratings. Other ratings sites include Niche and SchoolDigger.

One recent effort to overhaul the way schools are rated has struggled to gain traction. Tom Brown, a Chicago-based realtor, started the website SchoolSparrow to offer ratings that do not systematically favor high-income schools. ”Other school rating sites obscure the truth about public schools,” the site says.

So far, though, Brown said he hasn’t gotten outside funding or convinced real estate sites to adopt his ratings. Pageviews for the site have been anemic: 2,500 over a recent 30-day period.

Meanwhile, states and districts aren’t taking the lead. Many state report cards are difficult to understand or access, not available on phones, and not translated into languages other than English.

District-based ratings have also become more politically fraught in some places. Denver, for instance, recently scrapped its own school performance scores, which heavily weighted student growth.

All that leaves many parents sorting through a sea of information.

Ramie Johnson, a New Orleans parent who works for the group EdNavigator, which helps families choose schools, says she’s wary of the new U.S. News rankings and hasn’t found their high school rankings helpful previously. Many of the top high schools are selective admissions and out of reach for most students.

“Being at the top of a list is nice, but if being at the top of that list then makes that school inaccessible or hard to get into, then parents have to look at other options,” she said.

In NYC, culture shock took me by surprise

2021-10-22T13:00:00+00:00

For the first six years of my life, I grew up on the island of Trinidad.

I spoke with an accent, pronouncing three as “tree.” I ate Caribbean food, such as roti, aloo pies, and pelau. I was accustomed to drinking water straight out of a coconut, eating mangoes from my grandfather’s mango tree, encountering snakes and lizards, and seeing houses in every color of the rainbow.

Etana Williams

Then I immigrated to the United States with my mother, and we haven’t been able to visit Trinidad since. I enrolled in elementary school, where students made fun of my “trees” and teachers corrected them.

School lunches here tasted like they were made to feed as many mouths as possible rather than to be enjoyed. They mostly consisted of fast food with a side of canned fruit poured into a plastic cup and milk as our only option for hydration. And here, people dried their clothes in a dryer, not outside on a line. There were no vines with berries to pick, no roaming animals — just cars, crowds, and busyness. It was hard to feel at home among the drab concrete buildings.

I soon made friends with the kids from Caribbean countries. We reminisced about authentic Caribbean food, laughed at each other’s impressions of Caribbean dialects, and listened to calypso. Being with them and doing these things made me feel closer to home. Eventually, though, I got used to the way those around me spoke and mimicked it with the aid of American TV shows like “Good Luck Charlie” and musicians like Mariah Carey. I learned to pronounce my H’s and soon spoke with what I took to be an American accent.

Some adjustments were harder. There was one girl who compared my skin tone to mud. Another girl, who despite being Black herself, often told me “how much lighter” her skin was than mine, which “made her more beautiful.” I also had white friends who told me how pretty I would look with straight hair.

American beauty standards made me self-conscious about how I looked for the first time. In Trinidad, most people living there are either Black or South Asian, and I did not experience racism around skin color. Now, I found myself wanting to be lighter.

At the same time, I noticed that I didn’t feel any connection to my African American classmates or my African Caribbean classmates who had adapted to African American culture. I wanted to be friends with other Black students at my school, but I couldn’t relate to them. After all, we weren’t interested in the same sports, music, or clothing brands. I didn’t speak African American Vernacular English. I ate different foods at home and didn’t celebrate the same holidays, like Juneteenth.

While examining my disconnect from African American culture, I began to think a lot about my African ancestors, whose own history was disrupted by colonization and the slave trade in the Americas. I became more aware of what I shared with so many African Americans.

I continue to explore more about the connections among African, Caribbean, and Black American cultures, and I plan to teach parts of those cultures to my children one day. For example, I watched videos about cooking soul food and its cultural importance, and I saw traces of it in Caribbean dishes, such as macaroni pie. I watched American Black family sitcoms like “Black-ish” and read books that centered Black families, such as “Piecing Me Together” by Renee Watson. Like those in the Caribbean, many African Americans are religious and churchgoing, as is my family. All around me, I now see people who share my dark skin and extremely curly hair, which, despite my white friends’ comments, I’ve grown to love.

I’ve started to connect with more classmates and made friends by teaching them Trinidadian versions of American words, like bacchanal instead of chaos or drama. I show them fruits we eat there that aren’t popular in the U.S., like chennet, which is a little bit like an orange. In return, I learn about popular meals here and family traditions around holidays like Juneteenth.

I don’t know what African region or tribe I come from. That is a deep wound for me. I can’t help but wonder what customs and traditions I would have been raised with if my family knew our African ancestral roots. What language would I speak? What traditional clothing would I wear? What dances would I partake in, and what holidays would I celebrate? That’s why I plan to take a DNA test and find out where my African ancestors are from. It is my heritage to claim — connecting me to and differentiating me from others all at once.

Etana Williams is a 16-year-old from Brooklyn. She is a student at Brooklyn Technical High School, and she enjoys crocheting, reading, and playing the guitar in her free time.

A version of this essay originally appeared in YouthComm magazine.

Philly overhauls selective admissions policy in bid to be antiracist

2021-10-06T20:14:23+00:00

As part of an effort to be an “antiracist institution,” the Philadelphia school district is changing its school admissions process to make the city’s most coveted magnets more accessible to those who have been traditionally underrepresented — primarily low-income Black and Latino students.

All students who qualify, based on criteria including their grades and attendance, will now be selected from a lottery, rather than giving principals the final say from among a larger pool of eligible students. For five of the city’s most selective schools, preference will be given to students from zip codes that historically have sent few students to them.

The district’s most selective schools, Central and Masterman, have long seen overrepresentation of white, and more recently, Asian American students, and underrepresentation of Black and Latino students. But the severity of the imbalance has fluctuated. Last year, students, faculty and alumni at both schools pointed with alarm at the shrinking proportion of Black students compared to earlier eras and demanded change.

“We will continuously look at our practices so all students in the city of Philadelphia have equal access,” said Karyn Lynch, the district’s chief of student supports, whose office oversees the process.

School selection for the 2022-23 school year was due to open at 4 p.m. Wednesday and will run through midnight on Nov. 21. Now called Smart Choice, it is entirely online and centralized. The application will be available in nine languages.

The changes were made after talking to hundreds of teachers, administrators, principals, parents and students, district officials said. “Our central objective is to make systemic change, and to align ourselves with an equity focus,” said Sabriya Jubilee, director of the district’s new Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

As officials continue to “delve deeper into the equity lens process,” more changes are likely in the future, Lynch and Jubilee said.

The schools for which a zip code preference will be applied are Central, Masterman (which admits students starting in fifth grade), Carver High School of Engineering & Science, Academy at Palumbo, and Parkway Center City Middle College.

These schools will also now require a writing sample, but those essays will be digitally scored. “We worked hard to avoid data points that involve human assessment,” Lynch said. The process will be entirely centralized, she said.

For the second year, scores on state standardized tests, the PSSA, will not be considered. Due to the pandemic, the tests were not administered in the spring of 2020 or 2021. It will also eliminate from the requirements interviews or letters of recommendation.

Test score cutoffs have historically contributed to Central and Masterman admitting a disproportionate number of white and Asian American students. Some neighborhoods and elementary schools rarely send students to those schools. About a third of admitted students come from private and parochial schools outside the district.

Whether test scores will permanently be eliminated is still under consideration, officials said.

The changes are likely to be controversial, as parents and some officials, including former Governor Ed Rendell, have made the argument that access to the city’s flagship schools is what keeps many middle class families, particularly those who are white, in the city. Past attempts to make similar changes, most recently under Superintendent William Hite’s predecessor Arlene Ackerman in 2010, have failed. In the 1990s, Superintendent David Hornbeck tried to implement a similar policy, but clashed with Rendell, then the city’s mayor.

“We recognize that there will be people that are uncomfortable, but we’re leaning into that discomfort, and we’re going to do what we need to [in order to] do right by our students,” Jubilee said. “It’s our responsibility, our duty.”

The district has three tiers of high schools. The selective admission schools traditionally have had test score cutoffs at least above the 88th percentile as well as stringent grade, attendance, and discipline criteria. Citywide admission schools include the city’s longstanding Career and Technical Education centers like Dobbins and Mastbaum, but also a group of specialty schools created over the last two decades like the Workshop School, Robeson, and U School. And the third category are the traditional neighborhood schools, some of which contain magnet programs that have admissions requirements, like Northeast’s Aeronautical Academy.

In addition to the zip code preferences, the district plans to look at curricular offerings in schools in all neighborhoods to make sure that more students are adequately prepared to meet the selective schools’ criteria.

But the policy changes go beyond affecting the most selective high schools. Parents have the opportunity to choose a different school for their children than their traditional neighborhood catchment starting in kindergarten.

“I want to stress this is a K-12 process,” said Lynch.

Historically, under a court-ordered voluntary desegregation plan that was in effect for close to three decades starting in the 1980s, parents could choose elementary schools outside their catchment if their child’s presence would improve the receiving school’s racial balance.

But Lynch said that in this new plan, the goal is primarily to give parents choice, not to promote a larger goal of diversity or integration.

“The opportunity for families and parents to have choice is important,” she said.

Outside of that desegregation process, there was always a mechanism for parents to request that their child attend another school, sometimes for reasons of convenience, such as a different school being closest to a workplace or to the home of a caregiver, such as a grandparent.

Stephanie King, a white parent with two students in Kearny Elementary, a predominantly Black school in Northern Liberties, has long argued that white parents in gentrifying neighborhoods like hers use the selection process to avoid largely Black neighborhood schools. She questioned how allowing parents to do this would promote the goals of equity.

“How is this actually going to feed into equity plans, when the process has historically favored more privileged students?” she said. She requested a list of kindergarten students who sought transfers this year — 534 out of more than 12,000. More than 200 were white, a percentage out of proportion to their numbers in the district, about 14%.

Some of them, King said, are people in her neighborhood who apply to send their children to Adaire, Hackett, or Moffett — nearby schools with larger percentages of white students.

But Lynch said that the district’s analysis showed that parents of all races and ethnicities sought transfers for a variety of reasons and sees little evidence that parents seek to avoid schools with certain demographics. There are parents who want to transfer into Kearny, Lynch said.

Behind the patterns and practices and expectations today, both on the part of parents and people who work in the schools, is a long history that needs to be studied, Jubilee said.

“In order to undo the patterns,” she said, “we have to understand them.”

Some IPS police see themselves as educators; students and teachers do not

2021-09-22T23:17:47+00:00

Many officers who patrol Indianapolis Public Schools see themselves as educators and informal counselors, in addition to law enforcement officers. Most students, staff, and parents, however, see them strictly as police.

That divergence in perception is among the findings of an independent review of the district’s security force by Indiana University’s Public Policy Institute.

The report, presented to the school board Tuesday, noted other disparities in outlook: While 88% of the district police officers said they collaborate effectively with school personnel, just 61% of staff agreed.

The report includes recommendations on oversight, training, accountability, and more.

“I think it’s a great study. It provides lots of context,” said board Vice President Evan Hawkins. The district administration and Police Chief Tonia Guynn will review the findings and discuss possible actions, he said.

Board member Taria Slack said she hopes that more collaboration will lead to more trust between officers and students, “so we can de-escalate a lot of situations we have.”

Researchers found ambiguity and, in some cases shortcomings, in police roles, protocols, and training in racial equity and fighting implicit bias. “Combatting systemic racism requires ongoing learning, reflection, and intentional implementation of core concepts in their work,” the report noted.

The report notes a lack of clarity about when officers should and should not use force.

Concerns about campus policing, including racial disparities in discipline and arrests, have prompted the district to analyze how its police operate. The goal is to decrease suspensions and expulsions, improve school culture, and nurture students’ well-being.

But restorative justice — practices touted as alternatives to traditional discipline, citation, and arrest — has fallen short, the report noted.

“We have all but stopped implementing it because it takes a tremendous amount of time and cooperation with students, staff, and families,” one officer told researchers.

From 2017 through 2020, the district’s Black students were seven times more likely to be arrested than were white students.

The report recommended differentiating between student misconduct and criminal offenses, providing guidelines for using force, and involving parents and school staff in hiring officers. It also suggested the district step up training and collect data on policing. And it advised convening an advisory committee to recommend whether officers should wear uniforms and carry guns and tasers on campus.

Indianapolis Public Schools might consider rebranding its law enforcement “to create a shift in department culture and mindset,” the report suggested.

Michigan Republicans aim to limit teaching about racism and sexism

2021-09-21T22:45:48+00:00

New legislation proposed by Republicans would more sharply restrict how race is taught in Michigan classrooms, including banning schools from teaching that racism and sexism are inherent or that individuals bear guilt for wrongs committed by their race.

The Michigan House Education Committee took up the legislation Tuesday. Chairwoman Pamela Hornberger, a Macomb County Republican, supports the measure but hasn’t scheduled a vote.

The legislation is fueling an already contentious debate over critical race theory that has been cropping up in state legislatures and local school board meetings across the country. The debate is fueled by conservative reactions to “The 1619 Project,” a New York Times Magazine initiative that pinned the growth of the nation on the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans. That widened a political divide over whether racism is embedded in American society.

Debate spread across the country including in Michigan’s Traverse City, Alpena, and Lansing schools.

Sponsored by Republican state Rep. Andrew Beeler of Port Huron, the Michigan House bill prevents public schools from including “anything that could be understood as race or gender stereotyping” in their instruction. No penalties are prescribed in the bill.

The legislation has 10 Republican co-sponsors but no support from Democrats. If it passes the House and Senate it is unlikely that Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would sign it into law.

Beeler said he was careful not to use the politically charged term “critical race theory” in his bill but that didn’t stop lawmakers and activists on both sides from drawing connections to the academic framework that examines the systemic nature of racism and the lingering effects of slavery.

“We’re being told that based on the color of your skin you’re either a victim or an oppressor, and I want to nip that in the bud because it’s such destructive thinking to a person to teach them that you’re a victim because of the color of your skin,” said Tim Keller, a Port Huron North High School history teacher Beeler invited to testify.

“Racism is a fact in this country, but if you harp on it, you make it worse [by getting] people to focus on what divides them.”

State Superintendent Michael Rice has said that critical race theory is not part of the Michigan school curriculum, but Beeler and others said they want to proactively keep “poisonous ideas” out of classrooms.

Democrats were wary.

“This legislation could potentially stifle fruitful conversations around race and racism,” said House Democratic Whip Darrin Camilleri, a former Detroit social studies teacher.

“For generations, students in Michigan have not had an opportunity to discuss the real history,” he said. “The fact that many educators are choosing now to engage in very tough and difficult conversations around race and racism is something that should be thought about differently, and even encouraged.”

Beeler said there’s nothing in his bill to prevent frank conversations about lived experience with racism.

High school principals weren’t so sure.

“When the state potentially steps in and imposes sweeping, generalized, broad restrictions on what schools can talk about and teach it can be detrimental,” said Bob Kefgen, spokesman for the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals.

“In implementation, it can really have a chilling effect on a school’s ability to manage their own curriculum and manage their own lessons because they’re concerned of running afoul of a law,” he said in a telephone interview after the meeting.

The Detroit-based education advocacy group 482Forward called the legislation dangerous and likened it to book burning.

“We need to teach truth because in order to be in society we have to understand where our people have come from, right? And some of our people have done really awful things,” Molly Sweeney, 482Forward’s organizing director, told the committee. “We cannot be afraid of history. … We cannot be afraid to talk about it. We can’t be afraid to face it.”

Beeler’s bill specifically prohibits teaching the following:

That all members of a racial, ethnic, or gender group have the same qualities and beliefs.
That actions and beliefs are caused by racial or gender identity.
That people are born racist or sexist “by accident of their race or gender.”
That people bear collective guilt for historical wrongs committed by their race or gender.
That race and gender are better determiners of outcomes than character, work ethic, or skills.
That norms and practices of a racial, ethnic, or gender group are flawed.
That racism or sexism are inherent in people from particular racial, ethnic, or gender groups.
That a racial, ethnic, or gender group is in need of “deconstruction, elimination, or criticism.”
That actions of an individual serve as an indictment against the person’s race or gender.

“I truly don’t know which element of these nine items here would prevent someone from having a frank discussion about someone’s experience in their own life. That’s certainly not the intention of legislation whatsoever,” Beeler said.

A separate bill more directly targeting critical race theory was introduced in the Senate in May and awaits action in the education committee. Under that bill, schools would lose 5% of their funding if educators teach critical race theory, “anti-American” ideas about race, or material from “The 1619 Project.”

Correction: June 7, 2022: A previous version of this story incorrectly said the bill prohibited teaching that a racial, ethnic, or gender group is in need of destruction.

Tennessee law restricting classroom discussions on race inspires passionate, poignant and enraged feedback

2021-09-20T23:10:52+00:00

Tammy Williams, a resident of Franklin, Tennessee, called anything that resembles critical race theory “racist” and divisive.

Deborah Edwards, a grandmother near Memphis, expressed dismay at her home state’s “attempt to censor the teaching of American history.”

And Michael Franklin, a Vietnam veteran from Nashville, said a new state law limiting classroom discussions about racism reminds him of McCarthyism in the 1950s, when one U.S. senator’s paranoid hunt for Communist infiltrators forced thousands of people out of their jobs.

Their statements — passionate, sometimes poignant, often enraged — were among hundreds of comments submitted online to the Tennessee Department of Education on its proposed plan for enforcing a new state law aimed at shutting down teaching that delves into concepts like systemic racism and white privilege.

The feedback is being considered as Tennessee develops its final rules around the controversial law. Those rules will help determine how Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn will respond to complaints of alleged violations. She will have the power to suspend or revoke teachers’ licenses or withhold funding from schools.

It’s unclear when the state will begin enforcing the law, which took effect on July 1. Most students went back to school in early August.

“The process is ongoing,” state spokesman Brian Blackley said Friday when asked for a target date.

According to a Chalkbeat analysis of approximately 900 comments obtained through a public records request, almost half came from people identifying themselves as parents or grandparents. Nearly 60 came from current, former, or retired educators, and another 21 were submitted by advocacy, professional, or citizens groups. A smattering was written by elected or district leaders. The rest came from people mostly identifying themselves as Tennessee citizens, residents, or taxpayers.

Outsized input

At least a third of the comments came from Williamson County, an enclave south of Nashville that is mostly affluent and conservative, with significant political influence in a state government that’s under a Republican supermajority.

Some Williamson Countians spoke against any attempt to skirt historical facts about slavery, Jim Crow laws, or the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands. “My children and their peers deserve an education that is honest about this country’s history,” wrote Elizabeth Smith, whose oldest child goes to Williamson County Schools.

But the vast majority of Williamson Countians wrote that they supported the law, while also listing concerns about Schwinn’s enforcement plan. They didn’t like the 30-day statute of limitation for filing a complaint — and that only students, parents, or employees of the school or district in question would be eligible to file one.

“We parents need your help to resist the indoctrination of our children into this dishonest and divisive radical ideology,” said parent Cara Michelle, who accused Schwinn’s proposal of “watering down” the law at the expense of parents and grandparents who want a larger say in what their children are taught.

Hundreds of commenters appeared to use a template promoted by one of several politically active groups that have flooded Williamson County school board meetings this year with concerns about learning materials for students, diversity training for teachers, and school mask mandates during the pandemic.

“This new rule is too vague, too limiting, and does not protect the rights of parents or students,” says the language, used in more than 300 separate complaints.

Public venting

While the state solicited feedback on its proposals for carrying out the law, many writers used the platform to speak either for or against the new statute. Lawmakers passed the measure in May on the last day of the legislative session, just days after introducing the bill and without inviting educators, parents, or students to testify about its merits. Gov. Bill Lee signed the bill into law soon after.

“How are you passing legislation prohibiting teachers from teaching history accurately while also watching people die from COVID due to your inaction?” wrote Karen Ekeh, an elementary school teacher in Memphis, referring to the governor’s unwillingness to support mask mandates and another new law preventing schools from requiring COVID vaccinations.

Arlene Martin noted that lawmakers seem concerned about showing sensitivity to the feelings of today’s white students, when they aren’t doing the same for students whose skin is brown. She called the law an “old playbook.”

“Four hundred years ago, whites outlawed reading & writing for Blacks,” Martin said.

But Kristen Metzinger said she welcomed the law to shield students from teaching that she said “shames children based on their skin color.”

“I lived in California and fled due to the horrible living conditions and the liberal and progressives that are destroying schools and our children’s lives. I can’t believe that it is taking shape in Tennessee,” wrote Metzinger, who did not identify where she currently lives.

Michael Spain, who works at a middle school in Gibson County, worried about any teaching that appears to frame all lessons through the lens of race. “It deepens divisions,” he wrote, “and thus keeps us from true racial reconciliation.”

What can teachers teach?

Commenters for and against the law complained the prohibited concepts are vague.

Since the law prohibits discussing that “this state or the United States is fundamentally … racist or sexist,” does it also bar teaching that some of the nation’s founding fathers espoused racist views or owned slaves? asked Heidy Weinberg, who heads the American Civil Liberties Union in Tennessee, which opposed the law.

“This law does not clarify what teachers can and cannot teach,” wrote Weinberg, who worried the lack of clarity will “dissuade a wide range of instruction in the classroom.”

Jeanne Haddock, a former teacher from Knoxville, suggested the state ban classroom use of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which she called “despicable, divisive, and untrue.” The collection of articles and essays argues that the foundations of America’s history includes the legacy of slavery and contributions of Black Americans.

A group of demonstrators in Memphis in 2020 protest the recent deaths of Black Americans by police.

Beverly Bond, who teaches history at the University of Memphis and taught public school in Germantown for 11 years, said it would be impossible to teach American history without talking about race, gender, and ethnicity. She called the proposed guidelines “ahistorical and frankly ridiculous.”

“Teaching about race and racism does not weaken or confuse students; it does not embarrass or humiliate them,” Bond wrote. “Tennessee teachers are professionals who know their subjects and are sensitive to the feelings and needs of their students.”

Punishment and penalties

Under the state’s proposed plan, school systems found guilty of knowingly violating the law could lose $1 million, or 2% of annual state funds, whichever is less. Repeat offenders could forfeit the lesser of $5 million or 10% of funds.

But numerous commenters called those penalties excessive.

“At this critically important time, when schools are being asked to meet the social-emotional needs of students through the COVID pandemic and striving to address learning loss amid unprecedented demands on public education, it is not the time to place additional financial burdens on overworked, underfunded systems of education,” wrote Joseph Gutierrez on behalf of the Maddox Foundation.

The Nashville-based foundation also challenged the proposed penalties to revoke or suspend teacher licenses during a time when schools are already short-staffed.

“The punitive measures recommended by the Department of Education create a fear-based environment for teachers … and steal the joy that teachers find in seeing students thinking critically about complex subjects,” Gutierrez wrote.

Crystal Colter, whose daughter attends Maryville City Schools, said she fears for her daughter’s teachers. Politicized accusations are likely, she said, which would create a toxic environment.

“I do not want our hardworking teachers to be distracted or distressed about having a target on their backs regarding what they are teaching,” Colter wrote.

Several comments came from Tennessee lawmakers who were instrumental in the law’s passage.

Rep. Scott Cepicky, a Republican from Maury County, suggested the department remove any dollar amounts from the proposed penalties and stick with percentages of state funding. “The larger districts who may challenge the legislation would be able to afford the fines,” wrote Cepicky, referring to school systems in Memphis and Nashville.

Most of the groups weighing in opposed the law. They included the Tennessee Education Association, the Education Trust in Tennessee, the YWCA, the Urban League of Greater Chattanooga, and the Student Press Law Center.

A coalition representing Tennessee libraries called the law “an act of censorship” that is contrary to the democratic ideal of free access to information.

For all of the hubbub, Nashvillian Stephen Bryant questioned why. He noted that the academic framework of critical race theory is mostly used in higher education — not K-12 schools — to explore how race and racism influence American law, culture, business, and politics.

“My main concern is the distrust of public schools and school teachers that this law and these guidelines foster, without warrant,” wrote Bryant, a retired United Methodist leader. “The publicity around this matter calls great attention to a problem that does not exist.”

This NYC counselor is helping students work through COVID-era trauma

2021-09-07T12:00:00+00:00

After Randy Bowen lost three family members to COVID-19, he knew he needed to prioritize the activities that center him, such as meditating and riding his bike, so that he could show up for his students at Community Health Academy of the Heights.

Bowen, a school counselor of 14 years and a certified practitioner of a trauma therapy known as EMDR, started an evening meditation group to help his students deal with pandemic-era stresses ranging from social isolation to food insecurity. “I think the biggest hurdle to meditation for people is just taking 3-5 minutes out of the day to disconnect,” said Bowen, who began his career in finance before finding his professional calling as a school counselor.

Randy Bowen

Community Health Academy in Upper Manhattan provides wraparound social services for the whole family. “While we were able to leverage our relationships with families and conduct constant outreach, technological and mental health support [during the pandemic], I think that students are ready to get back to school.”

Bowen is ready for the new school year, too. He spoke recently to Chalkbeat.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What led you to become a school counselor?

I started out in finance and worked at a financial investment firm for about two years but became despondent with the lack of passion I had for my role as a licensing analyst. I visited St. Joseph’s College and met with an academic advisor in the school counseling program at Long Island University in Brooklyn. She told me to take two classes, and all I had to lose was money and time. It was the best decision I made. It was the first time in my academic career that what I was learning in school felt like an extension of my personality, strengths, interests, and who I was at my core. I share this story with my students to let them know that even counselors need to be counseled!

How did your students fare during the prolonged stretch of remote learning and social isolation?

Our school culture promotes getting to know students on a deep level as we are a 6-12 school, and the lack of physical interaction made this extremely difficult. Many of our students are first-generation Americans and come from low-income families in the Bronx and Washington Heights areas. Many of them also come from multigenerational households. As someone who lost three family members, including my grandmother, to COVID, I know first-hand the anxiety, depression, and isolation that comes with being away from a place of stability, care, and attention.

I’m so sorry to hear about the losses you’ve endured. You have a job that centers on caring for others. How did you take care of yourself through it all?

I have always counseled from a place of do as I say and as I do. When the pandemic started, I reminded my students that although education is an important step toward financial freedom and generational wealth, mental stability comes first. I shared with my students the anxiety and uncertainty I felt as an adult about the pandemic and the things I did to make me feel stable: meditation, riding my bike, and communicating with family and friends. I even started an evening meditation workshop for students to wind down after a tough day. Initially, students believed that you had to spend an hour in the gym or dedicate the same time every day to meditate. Showing them that we all struggle and equipping them with techniques to alleviate stress will be extremely vital going forward. This also held me accountable for daily meditation. It was a win-win!

Tell me about your evening meditation group. How do you teach young people to meditate?

Prior to the pandemic, I became certified in EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Processing, to support students who suffered through trauma that traditional talk therapy alone would not help mediate. One of the components of EMDR is grounding or mindfulness — ensuring that the client or student is aware of the present moment, as processing past trauma can be intense. During the session, we start by thanking ourselves for taking time out of our day to prioritize our bodies while finding a quiet space. I then walk students through deep breathing (in through the nose, out through the mouth) and talk through what they are aware of using the five senses, awareness of any pain or stress in the body while allowing distractions and thoughts to be a part of the session.

What student needs have you seen arise or grow during the COVID era?

COVID has exacerbated many of our students’ needs, including food insecurity, home displacements, inadequate living areas, technology and internet access, language barriers, and financial hardships. The lack of basic needs contributes to a rise in mental health crises felt by the entire family.

That’s a lot to endure, especially as a young person. How can schools best support their students’ needs this coming school year?

I think that all schools should start with a general wellness assessment that inquires about a child’s food, technology, housing, mental health, and financial situation within the household. Our high school social worker created a Google Form that was sent out to all our students. This data was then used by the high school guidance/social work department to provide support, such as at-risk counseling, referrals to our school-based health clinic, outside mental health organizations, and affiliated programs of our school’s community-based organization, CLOTH, or the Community League of the Heights. Our school also has an advisory system where teachers are matched with a group of kids. Daily meetings in these groups can also provide us with anecdotal information that can bridge any gaps students may be challenged with.

Last year, you wrote for Chalkbeat about how many of your students were traumatized by George Floyd’s murder. Since then, your school has created the Committee on Racial Equity. What are the committee’s goals, and how is it changing the culture and policies at Community Health Academy?

This year, the committee’s focus is on our instructional practices and how they align with Gholdy Muhammad’s five pursuits for teaching and learning. We believe that the student voice needs to be amplified in our community, but that can’t happen unless students are intrinsically motivated and invested in their education. The hope is that if students see themselves in the curriculum, it will spark their interest while connecting why they are in education to what they want out of education.

Tell us how you collaborate with teachers, parents, and others to ensure students have what they need to thrive.

My role as the chair of the Committee on Racial Equity has required collaboration among all parties to ensure that our students are not only seeing themselves in our curriculum but that their voices are valued. Last school year, I was in charge of coordinating our various subcommittees — assessing our instruction to ensure that it was aligned with culturally responsive practices, training students on topics such as race, equity, and microaggressions, and conducting monthly group meetings with our staff. I meet with teachers weekly in our grade team meetings to discuss students who may be at risk or struggling with a death in the family, illness, financial issues, etc. As a community school, we pride ourselves on not only supporting students but also the community. Parents talk to me about their students' progress, but also about services like burial assistance, housing, employment referrals, and more.

What was your own experience with school, and how does it affect your work today?

As a first-generation, low-income student from Guyanese descent, I was fortunate to attend a private school from K-6 and then New York City public schools after that. I benefited from small class sizes and a focus on mathematics in elementary school. In middle and high school, I was also enrolled in the Honors programs. I understand the generational trauma associated with those expectations of being successful for one’s culture. There were numerous people in my academic career, like my middle school dean, my AP U.S. History teacher, and my Spanish teacher, who helped me along the way. I hope that I am making the same impact on my students.

After a rise in hate crimes, some Asian New Yorkers are nervous about returning to school

2021-08-27T19:26:35+00:00

It’s not just the delta variant that makes Zhenghao Lin, a Chinese immigrant, nervous about returning to school next month.

Zhenghao, a rising senior at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn, said he has been subjected to racist comments at school since he arrived in New York City as a fourth grader. His anxiousness about interacting with non-Asian peers only grew over the course of the pandemic.

“After what I’ve seen on social media and about the Asian American hate crimes in New York City, I do not feel safe going back to school physically,” Zhenghao said. “I may have to deal with the occasional bat-eater comment or, ‘You guys started it’ comment, or any of those microaggressions. If I go on the bus or take the subway, I might have to deal with those comments, too.”

After a rise in hate crimes against Asians in the spring, advocates have heard similar concerns from Asian American families and students about commuting from afar to school and what they may have to endure inside of the classroom when school buildings reopen Sept. 13. For some students, that anxious feeling is compounded by years of microaggressions — subtle, intentional or unintentional actions or statements about a marginalized group — or racist comments they’ve experienced in and outside of school.

In New York City this year, confirmed hate crimes against Asians jumped from four cases in February to 34 the following month, with just over half of those involving assault charges, according to the New York Police Department. The number of incidents has declined since the spring but remains higher than the same period last year.

Cases first spiked the same month when six women of Asian descent were killed in Atlanta, which cast a new spotlight on violence and racism against Asian Americans across the nation. Some violent crimes in New York City were caught on video and circulated on social media, heightening fear among members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.

Kaveri Sengupta, education policy coordinator with Coalition for Asian American Children and Families, or CACF, said families have shared fears that range from potential hate crimes to microaggressions at school, adding to the nervousness of returning to in-person school for the first time in 18 months.

Sengupta’s coalition has heard from students in high-performing schools with large Asian-American populations who say that their administrators don’t really talk to students about their mental health needs. That can perpetuate the “model minority” myth — that all Asian Americans are high achievers — and ignores these students’ diverse needs that reach beyond academics, she said.

“That whole thing is swept under the rug because the outcomes are good, but what is that actually doing for students’ sense of self, confidence, all of those things?” Sengupta said.

Karen Zhang, 17, decided to stick with remote learning last school year largely because she and her family were worried about her picking up the virus on her 90-minute commute from her Flushing home.

Learning from home became taxing on Karen’s concentration, so she considered returning to Stuyvesant in the spring, when the city offered students another chance to opt into in-person learning. But that’s right when hate crimes were rising against Asian Americans in New York and gaining a resurgence of media attention. Even if her dad dropped her off on his way to work, she would have to wait for an hour outside of the school before the doors opened.

“I decided not to go because it didn’t feel safe physically, but also in terms of health, as well,” Karen said.

Karen said she’s never been physically harmed because of her race but has dealt with many microaggressions, especially in middle school on the Upper West Side, where the Asian student population was small. She recalls her peers making faces when they smelled the dumplings she would eat for lunch. Classmates would ask her to do origami for them even though she didn’t know how. She didn’t realize she was being stereotyped until recently. One of the best things schools could do to make nervous students feel better is to prioritize education about what anti-Asian harassment and microaggressions look like, Karen said.

“Education is a huge, huge, huge thing when it comes to addressing anti-Asian violence,” she said. “A lot of the hate crimes happened because people don’t see Asian Americans as Americans — just seen as a perpetual foreigner.”

Zhenghao Lin is a youth leader with Coalition of Asian American Children and Families.

When he first moved to the United States, Zhenghao said he would make fun of himself in order to make others laugh and earn their acceptance, but sometimes in response his peers called him a “dumb Asian.” His freshman year of high school, some students in his gym class would block Zhenghao and his Asian friends from serving when they played volleyball. They were often cut in line at lunch, and once, a student barred Zhenghao from entering the boys locker room, saying, “Look at this Chinese n - - - -,” referring to a slur for Black people.

In the weeks before schools closed, Zhenghao and his friends were exiting the locker room when another student said, “Holy crap they all look the same.” He wasn’t sure if that was directed at his group, but “there were indeed a lot of Chinese-looking people out in the locker room,” Zhenghao said.

Zhenghao chose a fully remote schedule last school year in part because of virus concerns, but also because he continued to see anti-Asian posts on social media, such as Instagram. Those posts, coupled with the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in the spring, made him question his identity.

“I was very depressed because I was like, why did I have to be born as a Chinese person? Why can’t I be like someone else, like a Latinx American or a white American, because like, people would say things about me just because of something I didn’t choose, which was being Chinese,” he said.

Now faced with a full return to school next month for the first time since March 2020, Zhenghao doesn’t know what would ease his nerves, though he has sought out therapy. His fear of commuting has dampened as he’s taken more trains and buses to and from his downtown Brooklyn apartment — but he does recall a man on a train moving to a seat far away from Zhenghao and his mother as they walked in.

When videos circulated of Asian people getting beaten up on the subway, 17-year-old Jenny Liu’s parents became even more apprehensive about her leaving their apartment in Ocean Hill.

Jenny, who is Chinese American, didn’t realize it right away, but she noticed that she wouldn’t look at her phone or read a book while taking a train this summer to her research internship and volleyball practice. Jenny is often the only Asian person in her train car for nine to 10 stops. She hasn’t experienced any violence on public transit before, but she’s felt uncomfortable: Two separate times, a fellow passenger got up and moved away from her as she took a seat nearby.

Jenny Liu

Taking the subway this summer has helped to ease her nerves for the commute this fall to Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan. After learning remotely since March 2020, Jenny is looking forward to seeing her friends, playing volleyball, and having a more normal senior year.

“That familiarity with taking the train more — still wearing the mask, of course — is a good thing, and that’s preparing me going back to the school year,” Jenny said.

Dina Yang, a 17-year-old rising senior at School of the Future in Chinatown, was with a group of her Asian American friends at lunchtime right before schools closed last year, when a student walked past and said, “I hope you don’t have COVID,” while laughing. Just before masks were required on public transit, Dina was boarding a subway train when a woman standing near the door pulled her shirt over her face. Around February, a man pulled down his mask and yelled “China” at Dina and her mother as they walked through Koreatown.

Virus concerns kept Dina, who lives in the Bronx, learning exclusively from home last school year, but her family felt more confident in that decision when they saw reports of rising anti-Asian hate crimes in the spring. She typically travels about 50 minutes to school, and her family considered it a risk for her to travel on her own.

But like some of her peers, Dina is feeling more comfortable with the idea of commuting after using the train this summer to get to work about an hour away without incident, she said.

“I realized nothing really happened to me this summer,” she said. “But it’s still on my mind that it would be a possibility.”

Dina Yang

In a statement, education department spokesperson Nathaniel Styer said schools play a key role “in educating students about how the diversity of our differences makes us stronger,” and the department works with teachers and school safety officers “to make sure students are physically and emotionally safe during this time.”

In response to the spike in hate crimes, the school safety division identified schools with predominantly Asian American and Pacific Islander students and created “safe corridors,” where police presence is increased between transportation hubs, such as subway stops, and the school. Those will be in place beginning the first day of school.

On top of normal requirements for reporting bullying, the education department created an online portal where parents can file bullying complaints.

Sengupta, with CACF, said her organization wants more data on how many bilingual counselors exist in city schools and what languages they speak, noting that sometimes students feel most comfortable approaching someone for help when that person looks like them or speaks their native language. The education department is planning to hire a full-time social worker for every school building without one or without access to a school-based mental health clinic. But Sengupta wants schools to be more intentional about who they hire.

The organization also wants the education department to conduct targeted outreach to families that alerts them about signs of potential mental health problems so that they know when and where to go for help for their children. For many Asian American families, mental health support can be considered a “western solution, in some ways, to a western problem,” Sengupta said.

The end goal is to ensure that this year “every student, every family” has a “trusted adult in the school building” who they can talk to about things beyond academics, Sengupta said.

Dina, the student from School of the Future, said she often felt mentally drained by remote learning, but teachers never reached out to check on her. She felt that was because she gets good grades. Her advice to teachers: “Check in on your students, often.”

Amanda Chen, a rising senior at School of the Future and a classmate of Dina’s, experienced a rash of anti-Asian, coronavirus-related harassment at school right before the pandemic shuttered buildings. Chen, who lives in Chinatown, is more concerned about encountering racism in school than other public places, since she’s used the train often this summer, but she feels more comfortable knowing she has supportive adults at school.

“If the racism happens at school and it’s targeted against me, I would feel more comfortable reaching out to the authority, the principal or the teachers who I feel comfortable talking with,” Amanda said.

I am an elementary school educator, and I embrace critical race theory

2021-08-23T15:00:00+00:00

As a new teacher in Arizona 20 years ago, I found myself in the middle of a campaign against bilingual education.

Arizona voters had recently passed Proposition 203 restricting bilingual education and English as a Second Language instruction, as it was called then, following a campaign by the conservative businessman Ron Unz. I was told by seasoned teachers only to speak English to students and to only send letters home in English. Any administrator could write us up for speaking another language, I was told, and I could even be fired.

I worked with other teachers who saw the white supremacy in this initiative, though, who continued to use Spanish to communicate with students and their Spanish-speaking families. That experience taught me that there will always be someone trying to standardize teaching and issue misguided, top-down directives. But it’s my job to provide my students what they actually need — and I need to bring my whole self to the job to do that.

David Rosas

Last year, in my 21st year working in education and after eight years working in school leadership, I found myself back in the classroom, relearning those lessons. It was the fall of 2020, and the students in my mixed-age class of fourth and fifth graders had questions about the history of voting in the United States. How does voting work? What is the “electoral college”? Wait, Black people weren’t allowed to vote? Why did Black people have to march and pay taxes and take literacy tests just to vote?

Mix in the Black Lives Matter movement, and our conversations and history lessons expanded to include discussions about current events, debates, and commitments to using their voices to resist discrimination. Students wrote about “Democracy Heroes,” a term that my co-teacher used to describe folks from various racial, ethnic, gender, and class groups who have fought against oppression.

Virtual learning added more difficulty. When I changed to a mixed-age kindergarten and first grade class, It became clear that picking a picture book that would spark curiosity in a 5-year-old was key to keeping that child’s interest on Zoom. Having that student’s race reflected in the text was one way to do that. And writing? There is no way anyone ages 5-10 will write if they are not interested in the content — and that’s true when they’re getting regular, in-person instruction. Teaching and learning remotely meant that writing prompts had to include our students’ lives and realities.

That is why critical race theory is not something I will shy away from, even as lawmakers across half of our country ban certain kinds of discussions of race and racism.

Using texts that include our students’ lives and realities centers their experiences as raced people, a tenet of critical race theory. By engaging in research about “Democracy Heroes” and using picture books that focus on characters of color, Whiteness is decentered — another educational tenet of critical race theory. Finally, we all thought of how to sustain our cultures and our integrity through storytelling — another educational tenet of critical race theory. Critical race theory is interwoven in all that I do.

It happens that New York City parents are OK with that. I know this because I am also a doctoral student and member of the Urban Education Research Collective at the CUNY Graduate Center. Our project focused on listening to New York City parents voice their concerns and share their perspectives about schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic and the country’s increased focus on racial justice. They told us that more parent and community engagement is needed to shape school policies; that their children’s social-emotional and mental health deserves more attention; and that New York City schools should use a more anti-racist and inclusive curriculum.

Teachers need the freedom to do what we have been charged to do – to educate. As we get deeper into the 21st century, we have to leave the tools of and perceived “normalcy” of White supremacy behind us, too.

To do my job last year, I needed an environment that let me use all of my tools to figure out how to teach reading, writing, and math, and hold space for all of the kids’ questions. I needed space to be a teacher who was racially literate and racially radical, who could both answer students’ questions about the world we live in now and help them imagine a world where racism does not shape their life opportunities.

I had that space, but not all educators do. Please, just let us all educate — and let us be our whole selves.

David R. Rosas is a first-generation, bilingual, queer-identified, Indigenous, Native New Yorker from Hell’s Kitchen, pre-gentrification, and is now an assistant principal at the Castle Bridge School in Washington Heights. David has been an educator for 21 years and has worked as a teacher in grades K-7, an instructional coach, assistant principal, and principal in elementary schools. Additionally, he advises pre-service school leaders at Bank Street College of Education and Teachers College, Columbia University.

Big education funders Gates, Walton, and Chan Zuckerberg are coming together to seek ‘breakthroughs.’ Will it work?

2021-07-21T17:50:19+00:00

Three of the biggest names in education philanthropy have teamed up to fund a new organization aimed at dramatically improving outcomes for Black, Latino, and low-income students.

The Advanced Education Research & Development Fund, announced Wednesday, is already funded to the eye-popping tune of $200 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Walton Family Foundation. (Gates and Walton are also supporters of Chalkbeat.)

AERDF (pronounced AIR-dif) says its focus will be on what it calls “inclusive R&D,” or bringing together people with different expertise, including educators, to design and test practical ideas like improving assessments and making math classes more effective. Still, the ideas will have “moonshot ambitions,” said the group’s CEO Stacey Childress.

“One of our mottos for our program teams and the projects they fund is ‘heads in clouds and boots on the ground,’” she said.

It’s an unusually well-funded start for a new education organization, especially as big education funders have seen their influence wane in recent years after some of their ideas showed uneven results and prompted backlash. AERDF suggests these funders still have significant ambitions for improving education in the U.S., even if those efforts are less splashy — or controversial — than they once were.

The organization emerged from work that began in 2018, when CZI and Gates teamed up to invest in R&D. That resulted in a project known as EF+Math, which funds efforts to embed lessons in executive functioning — a set of cognitive skills related to self control and memory — into math classes.

“These executive functioning skills allow you to focus on what’s important, ignore distractions, let you think flexibly to solve problems and keep track of ideas,” said Melina Uncapher, the program’s director. “Perhaps not surprisingly, they’re strongly related to math skills.”

That effort, now part of AERDF, will start work in three school districts — Newark, New Jersey; Vista Unified in California; and Middletown, Ohio — this fall, said spokesperson Ed Wyatt.

Ben Riley, the head of Deans for Impact, which has pushed for teacher prep programs to help teachers understand the “science of learning,” said focusing on executive functioning skills is a promising idea, but he’s interested in seeing more specifics. “What does that mean? What does that translate to?”

Overall, AERDF “does seem to actually be taking seriously that research actually has to be useful to practitioners,” said Riley. “I don’t know that there has been a lot of real moneyed efforts that have done that.”

The other project that AERDF announced Wednesday is called Assessment for Good, and will focus on creating better student tests that shift from focusing on students’ deficits to their strengths, according to Temple Lovelace, who leads the effort. (Lovelace said the goal is for the tests to provide results that are useful to teachers and families throughout the year, not to replace state exams.)

Andrew Ho, a testing expert at Harvard, said he welcomed the new effort and he shares concerns that assessments can promote negative perceptions about schools and students. Low test scores could lower teachers’ expectations for certain students, for example, or encourage affluent families to avoid certain schools, exacerbating segregation.

“Does testing expose or exacerbate inequality? The answer to that is both,” Ho said.

Riley, though, sounded a cautionary note. “The question here would be: are they going to be supporting assessments, innovative and different though they may be, that are still getting at the question of what have the students learned?”

Childress said that AERDF plans to fund up to three additional projects, putting $20 million to $40 million into each over three to five years. Childress said she’s particularly interested in efforts to improve early literacy and the science of reading, though other kinds of work will also be considered.

The organization will be asking, “What are the next two to three big opportunities or challenges we should work on that students and teachers and classrooms face every day, and if we could make breakthroughs here, it could make a difference for kids?” she said.

AERDF will be organized as its own nonprofit, but it will be affiliated with NewSchools Venture Fund, a venture philanthropy organization where Childress is also the CEO.

Philanthropic efforts to dramatically improve schools at scale do not have a particularly strong track record. The Gates-funded creation and adoption of the Common Core standards met stiff pushback, and there’s little evidence it significantly improved student learning. Similarly, a pricey Gates-funded teacher evaluation project in several districts did not boost student test scores. Small high schools, another prior Gates initiative, seems to have been more successful, though.

CZI’s signature initiative, the Summit Learning program, has fallen short of ambitions to reach huge swaths of American classrooms and has not been independently evaluated. Charter schools, the focus of Walton’s giving, have overall produced highly varied results, though a number of standout networks have helped students make large learning gains.

What remains to be seen is whether AERDF’s efforts will be any more effective.

“On the one hand, it is something we should celebrate — if we are in the business of trying to improve educational outcomes and student learning and capacity — that major philanthropic organizations are going to try for ‘moonshots,’” said Riley. On the other hand, “any historical look at education would say that we have heard that promise made for literally over a century and yet we have not seen it happen.”

‘Urgent as it ever has been’: Biden pick says she’ll rebuild civil rights office at critical time

2021-07-13T22:33:28+00:00

Catherine Lhamon, the nominee to lead the federal education department’s Office for Civil Rights, told lawmakers Tuesday that she would push to protect transgender students, reinstate Obama-era guidance around student discipline, and monitor the post-pandemic recovery of students with disabilities and students of color.

Lhamon laid out her vision for the Office for Civil Rights, also known as OCR, in a tense confirmation hearing. The work of enforcing the nation’s civil rights laws in schools, she said, holds “particular importance” as the country tries to move past the pandemic.

“OCR’s work now is as urgent as it ever has been,” said Lhamon, who also held the assistant secretary position for three and a half years during the Obama administration.

If confirmed, Lhamon would take over an office whose work shifted notably under President Trump. Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded several guidance documents that Lhamon helped to issue — notably around student discipline and the rights of transgender students — and under DeVos’ leadership, the civil rights office limited its investigations into allegations of discrimination at schools. Disorganization within the office during the Trump years left staff unable to do their jobs properly, some staff have said.

Lhamon said she would return to a more “even-handed enforcement” approach and would work to rebuild the office, so that “we can expect civil rights enforcement to be real and lived for students in schools.”

Here’s a look at some of the big civil rights issues senators raised, and how Lhamon said she would approach them.

The rights of transgender students

Several senators raised questions Tuesday about whether transgender students should be allowed to participate or compete in sports teams that correspond with their gender identity. The issue has gained prominence in recent months as several states have moved to ban transgender girls and young women from participating in women’s sports.

The Biden administration has said that LGBTQ+ students are protected from discrimination based on their sexual orientation and gender at school, which extends to sports and after-school clubs. How the office for civil rights plans to enforce those rights will be a key question for the incoming assistant secretary.

When asked whether she thought transgender girls should be allowed to compete on women’s teams, Lhamon said she would apply the right to protection from sex discrimination to all students. She also pointed to a case she worked on during the Obama administration in which a student who used a wheelchair was told he could be on a track team, but his times wouldn’t count. The resolution she helped reach, she said, allowed the student to compete as a full member of the team.

“I would want to bring that lens to the work in any athletics context so that we’re finding a way not to discriminate against a student who is unusual, not to discriminate against a student who wants to be on the team,” she said.

Students with disabilities

Most civil rights complaints in education center around students with disabilities, and Lhamon said that work would be a priority. Investigations will depend on the kinds of complaints the office receives, Lhamon said, but she said she would seek to address the unlawful restraint and seclusion of students, who often have disabilities.

The use of those techniques has come under new scrutiny after investigations in several states, including Illinois, Colorado, and Virginia found many instances in which students were improperly held down or isolated. Lhamon recalled a case she worked on in which a mother could hear the screams of her 9-year-old child, who was being restrained, while she was driving up to the school.

“That child may never recover from the harm that the school visited on the child, and the child could have died,” Lhamon said. “Those kinds of circumstances are ones I hope never to see repeated.”

Lhamon also suggested there should be “appropriate civil rights guardrails in place” for students with disabilities who continue to learn virtually and that it’s crucial for the office to be collecting data about how students with disabilities, English learners, and students of color are doing in the wake of the pandemic.

“Priorities for me are to know what kinds of opportunities are available to whom,” she said.

Student discipline

A key piece of Lhamon’s legacy from her time leading the office under Obama is the guidance she signed that encouraged schools to reduce suspensions and expulsions for students of color. She made clear on Tuesday that she wants that guidance back in place.

“I think it’s crucial to reinstate guidance on the topic, and I think it’s crucial to be clear with school communities about what the civil rights obligations are,” she said.

If confirmed, Lhamon would likely be involved in drafting any new guidance and would have to navigate calls to change or expand its reach. Some civil rights groups, for example, have asked the Biden administration to place stricter limits on school police, given how Black and Native students, especially, have been disproportionately arrested at school.

School integration

So far, the Biden administration has signaled a willingness to make school desegregation a part of the federal education agenda, most notably through a $100 million proposal to fund the work of districts that want to make their schools more racially or economically diverse.

But how involved the office for civil rights will be in enforcing school desegregation orders, or preventing districts from taking actions that would further entrench segregation in their schools, remains an open question.

In her opening statement, Lhamon noted that her mother attended racially segregated schools in Virginia both before and after Brown v. Board of Education was decided, and that one of the civil rights lawyers who argued the case, Oliver Hill, often drove her mother to school with his son. That experience, Lhamon said, informs her civil rights work. But she didn’t offer many details about how she plans to lead the department on this issue.

When asked what role the federal government should play in integrating schools, Lhamon said she thought it was “crucial” that students are given an opportunity to learn in “environments that reflect the world” and that she was eager to oversee the federal magnet schools program, which often funds schools meant to attract students from different racial and economic backgrounds.

As states place new limits on class discussions of race, research suggests they benefit students

2021-07-08T22:01:52+00:00

Mackee Mason says families choose his Austin, Texas charter high school because it’s safe, with little bullying or fighting. Mason, the school’s principal and football coach, credits its ethnic studies courses.

The two classes, which students take in ninth and then 11th grade, feature discussion and instruction in LGBTQ history, colonialism, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, police brutality, and exclusionary immigration policies. That allows students, who are predominantly Black and Hispanic, to reflect on their own experiences and learn about others’.

“I know without a shadow of a doubt that that is the number one reason why we have such a special place,” Mason said. “We have these honest conversations that at times can be uncomfortable but we push through that to make a better space.”

Research backs up Mason’s positive experience. A handful of recent studies have found that students are more engaged in school after taking classes that frankly discuss racism and bigotry — just as some educators like Mason fear such discussions could be threatened by a wave of broad state laws designed to limit the teaching of what some are calling “critical race theory.”

“These experiences where [students] grapple head-on with issues of identity and race and racism … does something to their level of engagement,” said Emily Penner, a professor at University of California, Irvine who has studied courses that include discussions of racism. “That process is really useful to them in an academic sense, probably in a personal sense as well.”

A handful of recent studies offer evidence of those benefits.

An ethnic studies course developed by the San Francisco school district increased participating ninth grade students’ attendance, course completion rates, and grades, according to a 2017 study coauthored by Penner. The class focused on social justice movements and discrimination throughout U.S. history. It also pushed students “to explore their individual identity, their family history, and their community history” and required completing a service project. Researchers compared nearly 1,500 participating students at three high schools to similar students who didn’t have the chance to participate in the class. Ninth grade GPAs increased by 1.4 points among students who took the course.
An Oakland class for Black boys decreased their chances of dropping out. The class focused on Black history and culture, and included discussions about topics like how to challenge negative stereotypes about Black males. It also features college and career advising. A study of six Oakland high schools found that the program reduced dropout rates among Black boys from 8.5% to 4.9%.
Tucson’s Mexican American studies course appeared to boost test scores and high school graduation rates, according to a 2014 paper. The class focused on social justice and patterns of oppression in society. (This became a political controversy and Arizona’s legislature eventually banned the class, but the law was later struck down by a federal judge as unconstitutional because it was motivated by racism.) Students who took the class were several percentage points more likely to pass state exams and to graduate high school, compared to similar students who didn’t take the course, according to the study.
A history lesson focusing on Black and Hispanic contributions to history improved political engagement. In this narrower study, a researcher provided history lessons about either the abolition of slavery or Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers to several hundred students in a few Chicago-area high schools. One group received a lesson based on a commonly used history textbook. Another group’s lesson on the same topic put a greater emphasis on the role of women and people of color in creating broad social movements. The study found that after the assignment, Black and Latino students in the second group were more likely to say they intended to do things like vote when they became eligible or join a protest.

The research on this topic has some limitations. Each of these studies focuses on a relatively small program, and it’s generally seen as easier to get good results from pilot programs than with large-scale initiatives.

Still, these findings are increasingly relevant because there appears to have been a meaningful uptick in efforts to acknowledge race and racism in schools. One recent study found that in the four months after George Floyd’s murder, there was a large increase on the crowdfunding website Donors Choose in donations to teachers for books featuring Black authors or protagonists — $3.4 million worth overall.

But some shifts have prompted a backlash under the banner of “critical race theory,” a term being used to refer to everything from teaching elementary school students about desegregation to separating students into “affinity groups” by race. Critics say that such efforts overstate the role of racism in American society and stoke division between people of different races.

In response, a number of states have recently passed laws attempting to ban “critical race theory.” The laws vary in scope. Texas’ law, for instance, bars schools from promoting the idea that racism is “anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States” or that an individual “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish” based on their race or gender.

“At a time when racial tensions are at a boiling point, we don’t need to burden our kids with guilt for racial crimes they had nothing to do with,” said Texas Rep. Steve Toth, the bill’s author.

Notably, the legislation does say that Texas students should learn about the “accomplishments of marginalized populations” and the “history of white supremacy.” It also says that conversations between students should not be limited as a result of the law.

It’s not yet clear what such laws will mean for educators like Mason, since so much depends on how the legislation is interpreted and enforced. He has no plans to scrap his school’s equity initiatives, and he doesn’t think they violate the new law, though its broad language concerns him.

“We’re not saying ‘white people, you are to blame,’” said Mason. “That’s what I’m worried about: If we’re talking about factual things and somebody feels hurt by that, they can try to twist it.”

A number of other commentators, including some conservatives, have raised similar concerns about the potential chilling effect of these laws. Some legal scholars say that the laws could face legal challenges as unconstitutionally vague.

Penner fears that it’s become even more challenging for educators to take these issues on.

“The current climate is going to make it hard for teachers to have the time and space needed to develop that skill set,” she said. “And that means students might miss out on the chance to have important conversations.”

Protesters confront Tennessee education commissioner over claims of critical race theory in curriculum

2021-07-01T21:09:50+00:00

Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn’s bus tour of summer learning programs across Tennessee was interrupted Wednesday when protesters gathered to criticize a state-approved curriculum they said promotes critical race theory and discusses sexuality.

The protest, organized by the Sumner County Republican Assembly, singled out Wit & Wisdom, an English language arts curriculum that introduces themes that some parents say aren’t appropriate for elementary school students.

About 40 people, many carrying protest signs, confronted Schwinn outside of Benny Bills Elementary School in Gallatin, the third stop on that day’s four-stop tour of rural and suburban schools outside of Nashville.

The commissioner paused for about five minutes to speak with the Sumner County group before reboarding her bus bound for an elementary school in nearby Wilson County.

The protest was the first Schwinn encountered during her whirlwind road trip of 50 districts in 10 days. The tour, which wraps up on Thursday, has spotlighted summer programs that districts must offer to bolster learning disrupted by the pandemic.

The discussion was civil as Schwinn stopped to listen to the crowd’s concerns about Wit & Wisdom.

“It’s failing in Louisiana; we don’t need it here in Tennessee,” Joanna Daniels, a Sumner County mom and board member with the Republican group, told the commissioner.

Schwinn didn’t answer when Daniels asked what she thinks about Wit & Wisdom but noted that curriculum is chosen locally. She encouraged parents to stay informed and praised them for advocating for their children.

“As a parent, I read every book that is coming in front of my kids,” she told the group.

The protest brought together parents and grandparents in rural and suburban Sumner County. Organizers promoted the gathering on social media and via email through notices that mentioned critical race theory and invited people to “protest the indoctrination of our kids.”

Critical race theory is an academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism. A new Tennessee law — spurred in part by the nation’s reckoning with racism and new attention to critical race theory — will limit what teachers can discuss about racism and bias when the new academic year begins.

Great Minds, a Washington D.C.-based publisher, created Wit & Wisdom, which at least 34 Tennessee districts have sought state waivers to use for their younger grades.

A national conservative group called Moms for Liberty has attacked the curriculum for months in Williamson County, south of Nashville. Critics there argue it introduces subject matter before some children are ready for it, while proponents say the materials challenge students to read and analyze at a rigorous level.

Schwinn discussed the curriculum concerns later Wednesday during a previously scheduled meeting with members of the Moms for Liberty chapter from Williamson County. Also present was Rep. Scott Cepicky, a Republican from Maury County, who pushed for Tennessee’s so-called critical race theory law.

“We recognize this is a conversation many communities are having and it’s important for parents to engage in these conversations,” said Victoria Robinson, communications director for the state education department.

The Sumner County school system piloted Wit & Wisdom to third graders in 2018 and has been adding grade levels. The curriculum was taught in kindergarten through eighth grade during the most recent academic year.

Sumner County Schools Director Del Phillips did not immediately respond when his office was contacted Wednesday for comment.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with details provided by the state education department about Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn’s meeting Wednesday with Williamson County parents.

Behind the scenes, civil rights groups urge Biden administration to place limits on school police

2021-06-29T11:00:00+00:00

A few months ago, four top federal education officials got an internal memo from a prominent civil rights group, The Education Trust, offering a roadmap for shrinking the role of police in schools.

The document lays out a vision for a shift in civil rights enforcement, complete with a candid accounting of potential pitfalls. Most notably, it calls on the Biden administration to warn that the presence of police in certain schools, and police involvement in routine discipline, could violate students’ civil rights.

“The Biden administration must counter this dangerous narrative that more police, weapons, and surveillance in schools will help keep schools safe if it wishes to make true improvements to school climate nationwide,” it said.

The memo offers a window into the pressures the Biden administration is already facing on an issue that has roiled many school districts since George Floyd’s murder — what role, if any, police should play in schools. Federal education officials have signaled that they plan to examine the department’s guidance on discipline and police in schools. Civil rights groups are preparing to weigh in, though any changes to school policing are likely to be met with intense pushback.

The Biden administration “might shy away from it, because it is a hot-button issue,” said Dan Losen of UCLA’s The Civil Rights Project, referring to school policing. “But I think it’s a serious issue. The time has come. It’s overdue. It would be hard for them to be totally silent on it.”

A spokesperson for the department did not respond to questions about the memo, including whether education officials have relied on it. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education asked for feedback from the public about school discipline and discrimination, including how students interact with school police.

“What we’ve heard thus far from the Department of Education has been very encouraging,” said The Education Trust’s Courtney Bollig. “It’s clear that they understand the importance and the urgency of this issue.”

The federal government’s role in school discipline has been a live issue since 2014, when the Obama administration released guidance pushing schools to avoid suspensions and expulsions. When students of color received a disproportionate share of such punishment, officials warned, that could violate civil rights law. The guidance also encouraged school districts to develop formal written agreements with police that spell out officers’ roles.

There is some dispute about how much of a difference the guidance actually made, with one survey finding that few district leaders changed their policies in response.

Regardless, in late 2018 the Trump administration revoked it, arguing that it had made schools less safe. Officials at the time connected the guidance to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, though there was little if any evidence to support the tie.

Biden has promised to step up civil rights enforcement, and his education department’s call for public comment is seen as a precursor of potential policy change, including new guidance. (Biden’s nominee to lead the department’s Office for Civil Rights, Catherine Lhamon, helped issue the 2014 guidance when she served in the same role under Obama.)

“We know that students of color are often disproportionately impacted by disciplinary actions,” a Department of Education spokesperson said. “That is why the Department is working to engage a variety of stakeholders on this issue to ensure all students feel safe at their schools.”

Some civil rights groups say reducing the presence of police in schools must be part of that agenda. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a number of school districts weighed scrapping school police — a number ultimately did, while many others kept them.

“What we hope to see specifically around policing in the new guidance is a clear statement that school policing is harmful to students,” said Katherine Dunn, a program director at Advancement Project, a nonprofit that has advocated to remove police from schools. “This guidance needs to signal to districts that they need to end the use of policing.”

The memo to department officials — created by The Education Trust and the nonprofit National Women’s Law Center — makes a similar case, though it doesn’t go as far as stating that police should be removed completely from schools.

Instead, the groups say the federal government should discourage police from routinely interacting with students, and discourage schools from putting police in schools that serve higher numbers of students of color, especially Black and Native American students. They want federal education officials to say those actions could constitute a federal civil rights violation.

The memo, obtained by Chalkbeat through a public records request, was sent to four department officials, including Ian Rosenblum, who used to lead The Education Trust’s New York chapter.

Realizing these civil rights’ groups goals won’t be easy, though, especially because some school officials, teachers, and students are skeptical about limiting police in schools.

Surveys have found that many students feel safer with police present, but Black students are much less likely than other students to feel this way. Research shows that police officers in schools generally lead to more suspensions and arrests, particularly for students of color, and in some cases, declines in academic performance. But some research, including a recent North Carolina paper, has found that police reduce serious violence in schools.

“There’s one thing everyone seems to agree on,” said Lucy Sorensen, author of the North Carolina study and a professor at the University at Albany. “It’s not good for [police] to be getting involved in minor disciplinary matters.”

While Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has pushed to reduce suspensions and expulsions for students of color, it’s unclear if he would support sweeping efforts to remove police from schools.

“When trained well, when working in partnership with the school to be proactive and a support for students, it’s a positive thing,” he said in May. “I’ve seen models where it works exceptionally well, where it even provides a pathway for students to look at themselves as potential law enforcement officers.”

In Philadelphia, 18-year-old Sheyla Street has had police officers stationed in her schools since she was in fifth grade. Alongside other Black students, she helped lead efforts to reform discipline in her school and citywide.

She’s seen a range of officers: Some have made efforts to connect with students, while others were intimidating. She remembers watching a police officer bang handcuffs on the desk in front of her sixth-grade class when he was looking into a cyberbullying incident — “That was aggressive,” she said — and as a high schooler, a police officer checked her bag each morning as she went through a metal detector at the school’s entrance.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a great way to start your morning off,” she said. “It seems unnecessary.” She’d like to see the federal government push schools to redirect money spent on school police to counselors and mental health support for students.

Other powerful groups may oppose efforts to curtail school police, the memo acknowledges. While national teachers unions have expressed support for school discipline reforms in the past, local unions have sometimes opposed them or protested plans to cut ties with police. The memo also points to AASA, the school superintendents’ association, as a potential opponent.

“They’re correct in saying that we don’t support additional federal guidance,” said Sasha Pudelski, AASA’s advocacy director. “I would have thought that the civil rights community would have seen that the previous guidance did not have much of an impact and not be so invested in having another set of guidance.”

Perhaps a bigger hurdle will be conservatives, many of whom have already rallied against campaigns to “defund the police” at a national level. The issue could be even more fraught now, as a backlash to efforts to address racism in schools continues to gain steam.

“We should be pretty worried about this fall,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank. “You’ve got all these kids who have been traumatized. Some kids are going to externalize that behavior — they’re going to act out when they get back to school.” More counselors could help, he said, but even still, limits on school police could disrupt school or endanger students and staff.

Others counter that police should not be the ones dealing with student trauma due to the pandemic.

“It’s important to not just talk about taking police out of schools, but also what are we replacing them with?” said Adaku Onyeka-Crawford, director of educational equity at National Women’s Law Center. “How are we adding more adults in the building who are trained to meet the needs of students — replacing the school-based police officer with a nurse, with a counselor, with a mental health professional.”

When students ask why they haven’t seen cicadas, we need to talk about environmental racism

2021-06-28T18:31:02+00:00

Driving southbound on Emerson Avenue in Indianapolis this year, I, like many, heard the loud whirr of the pharaoh cicadas. It’s a welcome, nostalgic sound to many, as they remember where they were 17 years ago when the last brood hatched. To others, the sound is a nuisance, as they sweep bugs off of porches and pluck shells out of gutters.

But not everyone gets to bear witness to this emergence. Almost as quickly as you notice their song, nature dials the volume down, right around 42nd Street. By 38th Street, there’s not a cicada to be seen or heard.

Ronak Shah

As a science teacher working south of 38th Street, questions about cicadas came up a lot this year. Students heard about them in the news, saw memes on Instagram and TikTok, and understandably, asked the question: “So why haven’t I seen or heard any?”

Why is 38th Street the boundary line for cicadas in our city? It may seem arbitrary. But to those who know Indianapolis’ history, 38th Street is one of the most obvious dividing lines in our city, as one of our main historical lines of segregation.

This is only the fourth generation of Brood X cicadas in Indianapolis since the 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education ruled that school segregation is unconstitutional. About three Brood X generations ago, the Justice Department sued Indianapolis Public Schools in the United States v. Board of School Commissioners of Indianapolis for continuing to segregate their schools in practice, even as white flight moved families from IPS to the outlying townships, exacerbating the racial divide between districts. The cicadas that came out 34 years ago emerged at the moment that the court-mandated IPS bus students to those outlying townships to resolve this segregation. That brought about another migration of white flight, this time to the neighboring counties and keeping a form of segregation in place.

One of the lasting impacts of segregation is environmental injustice, and it impacts humans and cicadas alike. Most of our city’s toxic brownfields are located in Center Township south of 38th Street and along the northern Mass Ave corridor, another line of segregation. The lingering arsenic, mercury, and lead in water and soil impacts human health while also sickening or killing cicadas gestating underground. These lands are often paved over to become asphalt deserts, and the compacted, rubble-filled soil that drives flood water into people’s homes also makes it harder for cicadas to burrow, let alone emerge. Trees are scarce, and greenhouse gases are abundant, creating urban heat islands that confuse the bugs and leave little room for cicada breeding, all while contributing to disproportionately higher asthma rates in people. Redlined housing practices forced a higher population density into racially segregated areas, which means less available land for cicadas to hatch.

This intersection of systemic racism and environmental inequity isn’t unique to Indianapolis. The University of Connecticut has an incredible cicada mapping project, a crowdsourcing effort to find where these cicadas emerge. You can take a look at cities similar to Indianapolis, such as Columbus, Ohio, and you’ll see the same effect: cicadas are widespread in the predominately white western half of the city and eerily absent in the mostly Black eastern half.

When students ask me why they haven’t seen or heard the cicadas, I want to answer truthfully and completely. That means discussing the history of racial segregation in our city and the lasting effects of environmental injustice. But this answer will be seen by some as teaching “critical race theory.” And to them, that’s blasphemy. Indiana’s Attorney General Todd Rokita seeks to champion these fears by barring funding for curricula grounded in critical race theory, which he claims “would endorse teaching factually deficient history.”

Luckily, unlike cicadas, humans can learn from our history and do better. It doesn’t take a purchased curriculum. Indiana social studies standards already require second grade teachers to teach students to “develop a timeline of important events in the history of the school and school community”; in third grade, to “construct maps and graphs that show aspects of human/environmental interaction in the local community”; and in eighth grade, to “research how human consumption of finite natural resources and human activities have had an impact on the environment.”

With Juneteenth now a federal holiday, I hope that from now on, those protesting instead of teaching history take that day to put in the work and honor their own history, which is inextricable from the history of racism in our city and country. This is already a part of Indiana’s story, and understanding it only requires students to be curious, observant, reflective, and willing to confront and grapple with facts when they are in front of us, without running from them. We should encourage that. And it requires teachers to answer their questions honestly. We should allow them to do so.

Ronak Shah is a seventh grade science teacher in Indianapolis.

Cardona: I trust teachers to handle history ‘we’re not proud of’

2021-06-25T00:00:51+00:00

Peppered with questions Thursday about whether he supports “critical race theory,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said that his department will leave curriculum decisions to state and local officials.

“It’s important that I reiterate at every opportunity I have that the federal government doesn’t get involved in curriculum,” he said during a hearing before the House education committee Thursday.

But he didn’t completely sidestep the issue of how racism should figure into classroom discussions, a question that has engulfed state legislatures and local school boards across the country over the last few months.

Cardona said he trusts educators to do their jobs, including teaching about the progress the country has made combatting racism. “But I think we can do that while also being honest about some of the things we’re not proud of,” he said. “Our educators across the country, I don’t think it’s an issue with them.”

And in an interview that aired Thursday evening, Cardona offered a stronger rebuke of restrictions on what can be taught in classrooms. “I don’t think we should be in the business of excluding what students are discussing or what they’re seeing for fear they can’t handle it,” he said during an event hosted by Chalkbeat and The Education Trust. “I think they can handle it and I think we can become stronger as a nation if we do it well.”

Just months ago, critical race theory was known only as a line of academic thought that argued that racism is deeply embedded in American society.

The phrase was catapulted from obscurity by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who claimed that critical race theory had infiltrated the federal government and public schools. At Rufo’s urging, President Trump issued an executive order barring the concept in federal agencies. (Biden quickly rescinded it.) In the telling of critics like Rufo, critical race theory and ideas associated with it overstate the degree of racism in American society and encourage judging individuals based on their race.

Rufo and others in conservative media — as well as the experience of some parents in their local schools — have helped galvanize a far-reaching backlash to a host of efforts to address racism in schools and acknowledge racism in American history. The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, recently released a toolkit for parents to combat “woke schooling.”

Those concepts include trainings that focus on white privilege or “white supremacy culture”; books for English class that emphasize racism; and the 1619 Project, a series of essays in the New York Times that recast the country’s founding as shaped by slavery and was adapted into curriculum materials for interested schools.

“It’s wrong,” said Alicia Geerlings, a parent in the suburban Philadelphia district Tredyffrin-Easttown, which was recently embroiled in debate over its equity initiative. “If you have somebody in kindergarten that learns you’re the oppressor or the oppressed based on your skin color, how are they going to make friends?”

That backlash animated many of the Republican representatives Thursday. “Are you aware of outcry and frustration right now among parents with the state of education in America?” asked Georgia Rep. Rick Allen.

Supporters counter that efforts like these are needed to address the racism that does exist in schools. “Before you adopted this amazing program … my children were called the N-word every day,” said another Tredyffrin-Easttown parent, Anita Friday. “There were scars they continue to experience.”

Others say the ideas have been misrepresented and amount to a manufactured backlash to efforts to treat people of color equally. “This is a post-George Floyd backlash,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor who helped develop critical race theory, told The New Yorker. “The reason why we’re having this conversation is that the line of scrimmage has moved.”

Nevertheless, a number of red-state legislatures have swiftly responded. Idaho, for instance, barred schools from requiring students to agree “that any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior” or that individuals are “inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members” of the same demographic group.

The Tennessee legislature went further. It banned a dozen concepts from the classroom, including the idea that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” Oklahoma passed a similar bill.

Even some conservatives have raised concerns about these laws. “The business of defining, implementing, and policing a list of prohibited ideas gets troubling real fast,” wrote Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, referring to the Oklahoma legislation. “It’s inevitable that middle and high schoolers may experience race- or sex-related distress when talking about Jim Crow, the Holocaust, Korematsu, or Roe.”

Cardona’s emphasis on local control suggests that he will try to steer clear of this controversy, and he has rarely if ever brought up the issue unprompted. Plus, his department is barred by federal law from dictating what is taught in local schools. “My personal opinion on this is secondary to my role as secretary of education around curriculum, which is very limited,” Cardona said. “We don’t promote curriculum. We don’t mandate it.”

Avoiding the issue altogether proved impossible Thursday, though. The Department of Education already emerged as a lightning rod because it mentioned the 1619 Project, as well as Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” in its stated priorities for a small program promoting history and civics education.

Cardona faced a number of questions about this inclusion, which he downplayed. “There was a very minor reference to an example that included that,” he said. He also suggested that such questions were political and amounted to a distraction from other work his department is undertaking.

The department will also have to sort through related federal civil rights issues. For instance, one anti–critical race theory group has filed civil rights complaints against a number of districts that have described themselves as systemically racist, saying they have essentially admitted to illegal discrimination. (This is likely intended to deter other districts from making similar acknowledgements.)

Meanwhile, Cardona has placed a major emphasis so far as education secretary on equity, with a particular focus on students from low-income families, LGTBQ students, and students of color.

Indeed, there remain large disparities in education outcomes and opportunity across American schools — and there is also evidence of outright discrimination. For instance, one recent study found that school principals were less likely to respond to an email from a parent they likely perceived as Black, compared to the same email from a white parent.

At the hearing, the conversation about “critical race theory” was dominated by Republicans who were generally critical of Cardona, claiming his department was promoting the concept. But one Democrat defended him — Connecticut Rep. Jahana Hayes, a former national teacher of the year.

“I’m a history teacher, I had to teach about the most painful parts of our history,” she said. “There are some things in our history that we just have to face head on.”

$100 million and many open questions: Here’s how Biden is approaching school integration

2021-06-22T15:50:24+00:00

For the last few years, the Dallas Independent School District has been trying to make some of its schools more economically diverse — and hearing from other districts curious about doing the same.

Its integration program reserves half of a school’s seats for students from low-income families, and the other half for middle- and higher-income students. And while just 14 of the district’s 230 schools are participating this fall, the ambitions are big in a highly segregated district: to create schools that are attractive both to families who already send their children to local public schools and those who might have otherwise bypassed them.

“There’s an appetite for more because we’ve got wait lists of families,” said Angie Gaylord, the Dallas school official overseeing the effort. “It’s been interesting to see so many districts coming to us to see the work.”

Now, President Biden wants to give more school districts money for similar initiatives. His federal budget proposal includes a $100 million grant program that would allow schools to apply for funds to make their schools more racially or economically diverse.

That’s a tiny slice of federal education dollars. But the program could represent a notable shift in federal education policy from indifference or even hostility to school integration to active support of it. If the proposal becomes reality, the Biden White House will arguably have done more to further school integration than either the Trump or the Obama administrations.

“Money helps to both pilot, start, and scale, and so let’s not sleep on that,” said Mohammed Choudhury, who worked on integration efforts in San Antonio and Dallas and will become the Maryland state schools superintendent next month.

At the same time, there is no indication that Biden or Education Secretary Miguel Cardona will make desegregating American schools a central priority — and there are plenty of powerful forces pushing in the opposite direction.

The pandemic strained school communities, and local officials may be particularly wary of any changes perceived as disruptive as they face steep enrollment declines. Legislatures currently banning the teaching of “critical race theory” in classrooms are unlikely to look kindly upon attempts to integrate schools that explicitly consider race. The federal judiciary has grown increasingly skeptical of those efforts, too.

When asked about his plans in a recent interview, Cardona pivoted to talk about factors outside of education policy that drive school segregation.

“We have to be part of the solution. And there are options within the schoolhouse or school systems to provide diversity,” he said. “But I also think we have to look at it more holistically and make sure we’re part of the conversation around how the environment where schools are located lack diversity, or lack the ability for people to move if they so choose to.”

America’s schools are highly segregated by race and family income. In 2018, 40% of Black students in the U.S. attended a public school where 90% or more of their peers were students of color. In 2019, the typical low-income student went to a school where two-thirds of their peers were also low-income, according to an analysis provided to Chalkbeat by University of Southern California researcher Ann Owens.

The halting — and even reversal — of progress toward racially integrating American schools came as courts eased up pressure on desegregation and limited schools’ ability to design their own integration programs.

In the 2007 case Parents Involved v. Seattle, the Supreme Court struck down district-created integration plans that considered students’ race in school assignments, ruling that such programs were discriminatory. “Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Those legal and political challenges help explain the focus on programs like the integration grants, which advocates, lawmakers, and education department officials have been trying to get off the ground for years. Then-Secretary of Education John King launched a smaller $12 million grant program at the end of the Obama administration that Trump officials canceled a few months later. An expanded grant proposal, the Strength in Diversity Act, passed the House but stalled in the Senate last year, and hasn’t gone anywhere yet this term.

As the Biden administration put together its budget plan, it incorporated aspects of that bill. We “had been thinking about proposals that had bipartisan support, that were voluntary, that were state- and/or district-led and driven,” said Jessica Cardichon, deputy secretary at the Department of Education. “What is the appropriate federal role? Providing the resources to help support those efforts.”

Democrats, who narrowly control both houses of Congress, are optimistic the Biden program will survive the budget process, which wouldn’t require Republican support.

“We recognize there are serious consequences often associated with racial isolation in schools,” said acting assistant secretary for civil rights Suzanne Goldberg. “Schools with a significant or majority or entire populations of students who are Black and Brown tend to be lower-resourced schools.”

Crucially, that program could fund planning efforts — which are often complicated and politically difficult — and create more examples of successful integration strategies.

“Pushing integration high enough on the list can be a challenge, and when there are no resources to support that, it’s especially difficult,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank that supports school integration work.

Some see this as a promising moment. As the pandemic recedes, school districts will have more time and space to consider changes. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder last year, many districts expressed a renewed interest in improving conditions for students of color, who have been found to benefit from integrated schools. Advocates say that momentum could still be harnessed, though it’s unclear whether backlash to racial equity efforts will impede that work.

“It’s hard to tell what direction this is headed in,” said Stefan Lallinger, who heads the Bridges Collaborative, a group of school districts, housing authorities, and other organizations working to advance school integration. “Do you think of the segregation that exists in your community as part and parcel of the broader racial injustice that exists ... or are you able to, in your mind, separate the fact that your child goes to a segregated school from that fact that you participated in a Black Lives Matter protest a month ago?”

In the last year, lawmakers in North Carolina and Massachusetts have proposed legislation to further school integration, and districts like Milwaukee have revived talks, too, noted Gina Chirichigno, the director of the The National Coalition on School Diversity.

“There has been a shift,” she said. “People are really thinking about the longer-term issues and seeing this as an opportunity to change some things.”

But the voluntary grant program would not prompt any changes in the many segregated communities where officials have no interest in volunteering. It will also likely be a hard sell to get districts to collaborate on integration — something critical to real progress, since most segregation occurs between schools in different districts.

Aside from the grant proposal, the Biden administration has said little else about school segregation or its plans to address it. (Biden himself has opposed federally mandated school desegregation efforts, which drew criticism during the campaign from Kamala Harris, his then rival and now vice president.) Education Secretary Cardona has rarely talked about the issue and he doesn’t plan to mention segregation at an “equity summit” Tuesday, according to prepared remarks.

Over the long term, the department’s Office for Civil Rights will play a key role in determining the Biden administration’s path forward. School integration advocates hope the office will actively enforce school desegregation orders that are still in effect and try to prevent districts from taking steps that would further entrench segregation in their schools. Many see President Biden’s pick to head the office, Catherine Lhamon — nominated last month and not yet confirmed — as an ally.

In the meantime, advocates for school integration say there is more the Biden administration could do beyond its $100 million plan.

One step, they say, would be to reissue the guidance scrapped by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in 2018 about how school districts can legally consider students’ race in school assignment policies in the wake of the Parents Involved decision. (The decision limited, but did not bar completely, consideration of race.)

Kimberly Lane, who oversees magnet schools for Wake County schools in North Carolina, said that clarity would be welcome. “It’s a real challenge to try to figure out how to do the work in an environment that is legally acceptable and meets the needs of the students and the community,” she said. The district uses magnet schools to help reduce economic segregation. “As districts, we don’t know where the line is.”

For now, the Biden administration won’t say specifically whether it’s working to reinstate that guidance. “We are looking at all of the ways in which we can support schools in achieving racial diversity in their student bodies,” Goldberg said in response to a question about the guidance.

Another idea would be to tie school integration efforts into any new federal spending on education. Biden has proposed spending billions more on school infrastructure and pre-kindergarten, and some integration advocates say districts should be encouraged to build new schools in places that would lead to more diverse student bodies, for example.

“What I’m looking for is a proactive approach that puts integration at the forefront of the spending that is going to happen over the next couple of years,” Lallinger said, “so that we’re not then trying to dig ourselves out of a hole.”

Sarah Darville contributed reporting.

Schwinn: Guidance for what Tennessee teachers can and can’t teach on race will come by Aug. 1

2021-06-09T23:46:35+00:00

Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn said teachers deserve clarity about a controversial new Tennessee law limiting what they can teach about racism and inequality, and she promises to deliver guidance by Aug. 1.

The guidance also will outline the state education department’s process for evaluating complaints filed with her office and levying financial penalties against districts whose teachers cross the line, Schwinn said.

In an interview Wednesday with Chalkbeat, Schwinn spoke publicly for the first time about the law she is required to enforce when the 2021-22 school year begins.

“My job is to implement the bills as they are passed by the General Assembly,” she said. “I think what teachers deserve more than anything is to understand what is expected of them and certainly any parameters that are in place.”

The law says “the commissioner shall withhold state funds, in an amount determined by the commissioner” if a public school district or charter school “knowingly violates” the ban on teaching or promoting 14 concepts that the legislature viewed as divisive, cynical, or misguided. (See section 51 of the law.)

The concepts include elements of critical race theory, an academic framework that explores how race and racism influence American law, culture, business, and politics. Banning them would restrict classroom conversations about white privilege, institutional racism, and racial bias.

The GOP-controlled legislature passed the ban along partisan lines last month on the final day of its legislative session, and Gov. Bill Lee signed the measure into law on May 24.

Schwinn said her department’s legal team has been collaborating with the state attorney general’s office to prepare guidance for educators. She plans to seek feedback on the first draft from a group of superintendents, lawmakers, and members of the public before making revisions and publishing a document by Aug. 1.

The commissioner made clear that the state will provide guidance — not training — on how to comply. Any training and professional development must come at the district level.

Dale Lynch, who leads the state superintendents organization, said school leaders will have to work quickly to ensure teachers understand the new parameters.

Most Tennessee school systems start their academic year in August, preceded by teacher training on new state or federal policies affecting them. Adding to the challenge, district leaders will have just wrapped up expanded summer learning programs and then face deadlines in August to submit plans for spending their federal coronavirus relief funds.

“It is definitely a very tight timeline,” Lynch said of receiving the guidance as late as Aug. 1.

“Superintendents across the state have got to lean on the department to help us understand how to follow the letter of this law,” he said. “The earlier that we can get this type of information, the better training that we’ll be able to provide to our teachers.”

But Schwinn said she won’t rush guidance on “this incredibly sensitive topic.”

Penny Schwinn

“We recognize that this is something that needs to be treated with care and sensitivity,” she said. “We are working closely with counsel to ensure we are fully compliant with the law and also taking into account a representative group of voices because this process needs to be transparent.”

She added: “What is very important to me is that I do not want this to be a subjective process. I don’t want this to be a process where it was not clear on the front end what the expectations are.”

Rep. John Ragan, the Oak Ridge Republican who co-sponsored the bill, said educators who object to the new law must still comply with it.

Some teachers have said on social media and in news reports that they planned to ignore the ban, but Ragan cites Tennessee’s teacher code of ethics, which says educators must abide by all applicable federal and state laws.

“Those teachers who have announced they will not follow this law have announced that they’re intending to violate their own code of ethics,” Ragan told Chalkbeat recently. “I personally find that unacceptable.”

“I certainly respect the opinion of teachers,” he added, “but I will not respect an avowed intention to disobey the law.”

Before becoming a teacher, I was a YA author. My books normalized whiteness.

2021-06-04T14:00:00+00:00

I grew up talking about race and class and equity at my dinner table with my activist parents. During my two decades in the classroom, I taught a culturally sustaining curriculum, helping a diverse group of adolescents develop a positive identity through reading and writing. But in my first career, I normalized whiteness for a generation of young people.

I am a retired middle school English teacher. White. Jewish. I leave a legacy of beautiful students whom I’ve been honored to teach. But throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I pumped out commercial young adult and middle-grade fiction. I started out editing teen romances and went on to write my own series fiction, produced under deadlines so tight I sometimes smacked out a whole novel in under two weeks. The books were big business, marketed to deliver a frothy, irresistible confection to the largest audience.

Eve Becker

What audience? When I was a young editor, just starting out, I remember discussing the lack of diversity in these books with a boss. Where were the Black kids? “They don’t read,” my boss told me. “There’s no market for that.” Sit with that for a moment.

Eventually, my boss did put a Black model on the cover of one of our signature romance lines and hired ... a white writer to write the Black protagonist. (Left out entirely — as it usually was at the time — was any discussion of kids who were brown, Asian, or anything besides Black or white.) It fell to me to edit the book. I proceeded to remove certain tropes so astonishingly racist that I just sat at my desk shaking my head.

And what about my own books?

I was a red diaper baby, whose grandparents came to this country looking for a refuge from hate and whose parents were willing to fight for their ideals. But I also spent the first 40 years of my life — until I became an educator — in a world that was mostly white, with whiteness as the default. My publishing colleagues and editors, for example, were white. Every single one of them.

So what did that look like, between the covers of my books? I never felt comfortable owning those hastily written reads that had once been my bread and butter. That part of my life is long over, and my identity as an educator is strong. Let those sleeping dogs yellow and fade. But a social media post from a long-ago colleague and a letter from a middle-aged fan who’d tracked me down, got me thinking about those books again. I took a box of them down from the closet, where they’d been sitting, untouched, for decades: more than 30 teen and middle-grade novels I had written under nine different pseudonyms.

I began with one that a reviewer had singled out for its “diverse supporting cast and authentic dialogue.” Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as I’d feared.

But it was. Sure, I had some “diverse” secondary characters. Like the occasional “pretty black girl” (not capitalized in the late 20th century), the “dark-skinned dreamboat” with the obvious Latinx name, the “Korean” roommate — 100% American, with immigrant parents. Please kill me. Most of my books’ characters and all the protagonists were white. By default. There wasn’t a single time that I described any of my white characters by race. Gender norms? Don’t start me.

And can we talk about how I erased my own identity from these books? Not a single protagonist was Jewish. They had last names like Miller and Powell. And they came from the suburbs, from a land of tan and white station wagons, football games, and proms, none of which were personally familiar to this native New Yorker. The Miller and Powell kids had two-parent families, sat down to dinner together, were able-bodied, and aggressively heteronormative.

And this is what anyone of any race or group in this country over the age of 25 or so grew up with: Default whiteness in books, movies, and TV shows. Christian hegemony. Genderization. Every other identity erased.

“When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read,” writes Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, in her article “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” “or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.”

I put the box of books back in the closet. Young readers finally have choices that paint a richer, more authentic picture of who we are and who we want to be. We white, lifelong progressives of a certain age like to think we weren’t part of the problem. I have a written record that I was.

But a more pressing concern than a box of out-of-print books was what I’d passed down to my students. After surveying my old novels, I did an inventory of my curriculum for the past 20 years. Whew. A good syllabus for my mix of students. Beautiful books by authors of so many backgrounds. There was also my classroom lending library, full of Bishop’s windows and mirrors — book choices where any member of my class could find a reflection of themselves or an opening into someone else’s world. A few of the many books that my middle school students had loved in recent years included the fantasy novels “Akata Witch” by Nnedi Okorafor and “Children of Blood and Bone” by Tomi Adeyemi; and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s debut novel, “Purple Hibiscus,” all three tying into a related unit in social studies on West Africa; Elizabeth Acevedo’s novel in verse, “The Poet X”; Jason Reynolds’ “Ghost,” and the graphic memoirs “American Born Chinese” by Gene Luen Yang and John Lewis’ “March.”

My students had also read classics — “To Kill a Mockingbird,” for example, which I taught for a number of years in the early 2010s. With its “white savior” hero and its Black characters that need saving, many teachers have now removed it from the syllabus.

In the years before educators began discussing the book’s issues at conferences and in online forums, I asked my students to delve into the ways that author Harper Lee was a product of her time; I invited them to examine the book’s communities — and author — with a reflective eye. A social map of the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, was one assignment. “To Kill a Mockingbird” was on my syllabus because it is magnificent in language and unusual in structure, with complex young characters and a message about stepping into each other’s shoes. And isn’t it worth considering why “To Kill a Mockingbird” was radical in its time, became a perennial, but now shows its racial fault lines? I taught “To Kill a Mockingbird” with Richard Wright’s stunning autobiography, “Black Boy,” about growing up Black at the turn of the last century in the deep South. The disparate lenses of the two books offered rich and frank discussions about race, perspective, history, and the power of words and literature.

During my final years in the classroom, just before the murder of George Floyd and an intensified discussion on race and social issues in the classroom, I might have said, let’s read the classics with intention, as beautifully crafted pieces of literature and primary sources of white supremacy. Flowers and thorns. Along with a freshly blooming canon. Let’s ask who is on the pages and who is not.

But my box of teen romances made me confront how deeply entrenched the subliminal messages were — in so many classic texts and older mass-market fiction alike — with their unconscious erasure, their twisted history, their systemic racism. How many generations will it take to banish those messages? Can we vanquish them while still reading them, watching them, metabolizing them? My own books made me consider, for a moment, the notion of a curriculum without any of the old canon at all. Can students learn to be thoughtful, critical readers without “Mockingbird”? Are there other books that warrant our students’ attention? Yes and yes.

With this in mind, some teachers poll their students on curricular book choices. Some of us design pairings to augment the traditional canon and recenter the discussion. Some of us create a syllabus of titles that haven’t traditionally been taught in school. My tried-and-true recipe is a mix of diverse full-class texts to model how we read and discuss literature; small groups, where students read books of choice together; and a vigorous independent reading program, which affords the freedom to read for individual appetite and encouragement to read widely and across divides. Equally important are opportunities to write about literature with a speculative lens — to write scenes from other characters’ points of view, rewrite from another time or place, refashion endings, and push, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie extolls us, against a single story.

Eve Becker taught middle school English and Humanities in New York City for 20 years. As founder of Leaf and Pen, she leads writing retreats and workshops for educators. Prior to becoming a teacher, she was a writer and editor. In 2012, she was awarded the acclaimed Pushcart Prize for her essay “Final Concert.” She is currently a doctoral student in English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

This essay was adapted from a piece published on the author’s blog.

It’s not enough for teachers to call themselves ‘anti-racist.’ Here’s how we can live that value.

2021-05-27T19:52:17+00:00

Living in a world where white allies are finding new ways to pat themselves on the backs while another Black person is being shot and killed right in front of their eyes is exhausting.

As a first-year teacher in Washington, D.C., I don’t feel like I have the tools to comfort and care for my students. The only tool I do have is my non-white skin, which, as we all know, is no tool at all. Every day, I must unlearn the white supremacist schooling system.

Ayana Dudley

While it’s easy to criticize systems, I’m determined not to leave it at that. Because it’s not enough to claim the mantle of “anti-racist.” It’s an empty phrase if not coupled with the hard work of making our institutions fairer. To that end, here are some steps I believe educators can take to make inequitable, slowly evolving school systems work better for right now.

Too often, curriculums are centered around educating white students, and that needs to change.

A year into teaching, I can already see that the curriculums we are forcing upon our students are not centered around their humanity and well-being. Sure, we read stories with characters they may be able to see themselves in, but this is not enough.

School curriculums should empower and excite students to use what they learn in the classroom in the real world. For example, reading “All Quiet on the Western Front,” a story about German teens going to fight in World War I, doesn’t quite do that for my students. That doesn’t mean that the story isn’t important and shouldn’t be taught to middle schoolers; it just means that the connection to the students — the grand “so what?” is often missing.

One way that I make my mandatory curriculum work for my students is to bring relevant texts and experiences to support the anchor text. While my students may not see themselves as German soldiers, many of them have experience playing video games that simulate war. Giving students the chance to make this connection motivated them to read on and see what overlap existed between the pages and their PlayStations.

It’s OK to forgo the ‘do now,’ sometimes.

This past January, after a violent, pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, just blocks away from where some of my students live, I didn’t mention it in class in the days that followed. As much as I wanted to debrief with my students and give them the space to talk about what had happened, I didn’t know how to do it.

There’s an illusion of a disconnect between school and the “real world,” but the real world doesn’t stop being painful or hard just because you log into class or walk onto campus. It’s unfair to ask students to carry on as usual after potentially traumatizing events. Systems cannot be fixed when we do not create room to discuss, grieve, and problem-solve.

Remaining silent and acting as if things never happened exacerbates the feelings of hopelessness that are unfortunately very common in our society. Forgoing an academic “do now” for a necessary and uncomfortable conversation will never be as damaging as forgoing the conversation itself. I wish I realized this earlier and something I regret not having done in the days after Jan. 6. Sometimes that means skipping that reading quiz and using the time to process, connect, and strategize.

Students should be given the opportunity to take part in instruction. Our lessons should center students.

In my classroom, students sometimes tune out because they are way too used to hearing the teachers being the ones talking at them. Lately, I’ve been having students lead small parts of the class. One of my students produced an amazing writing response that we wanted the rest of the class to see as an exemplar. So we had her review it with her classmates and explain her thought process.

My students got more out of a classmate explaining the paragraph than they would have if their teachers had been the ones doing the talking. I also got a window into how some of my students analyze the work I’ve given them. When educators take a step back and hand their title over to their students, they are sure to learn a thing or two. This exercise also allows students to center themselves in their work and see it as valuable to others.

Being an urban educator when it’s barely shameful to display white supremacist notions makes me realize that while I can never be the perfect teacher, being mindful of what it means and looks like to embody anti-racism will bring me ever closer.

Ayana Dudley is a first-year teacher in Washington, D.C. She is pursuing her master’s in education at Johns Hopkins in partnership with Urban Teachers. She has a passion for cooking, art, and working with middle school students. One day, she hopes to work in education policy and reform — with the goal of creating and sustaining equitable classrooms.

How Biden grants and parent concerns of ‘indoctrination’ spurred Tennessee Republicans to limit how race and racism are taught

2021-05-26T00:04:12+00:00

For months, Tennessee Republican lawmakers were hearing from dozens of parents concerned about how educators were trying to make their lessons more inclusive in response to the nation’s racial reckoning.

One mom even reported that her 7-year-old daughter, who is white, was having suicidal thoughts because of uncomfortable conversations about race in her classroom.

Simultaneously, GOP leaders were tracking bills that would restrict how race and racism are taught in other states. But they hadn’t planned to push their own version until the week of April 19, when President Joe Biden’s administration announced a new grant program for history and civics education.

The grant program — prioritizing instruction on diversity, anti-racism, and the legacy of slavery — unleashed a torrent of backroom discussions just 2½ weeks before Tennessee’s General Assembly adjourned on May 5.

Interviews conducted recently with key players in those discussions shed light on why Tennessee lawmakers abruptly moved to join their counterparts in Idaho, Iowa, and Oklahoma to ban the teaching of topics they viewed as cynical, divisive, and misguided.

The bill passed along partisan lines in Tennessee’s GOP-controlled legislature on the final day of the session, with white Republican legislators voting for it and Black and white Democrats voting against it. On Monday, Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed the legislation into law.

The new law restricts how public school teachers can talk about racism, sexism, and bias in their classrooms beginning next school year. But most educators were unaware of the 11th-hour proposal as it barreled through the legislature during Teacher Appreciation Week. They were focused instead on giving their students annual state tests and closing out a pandemic-challenged school year.

“We moved fast,” said House Education Committee Chairman Mark White of Memphis, who helped guide the bill’s passage.

“It was too important to wait until next year,” White added. “We want our teachers to know that, when the new school year begins, they should not teach certain concepts.”

Viral email stokes mistrust about socialist indoctrination in schools

In formal House discussions, Biden’s grant program was not highlighted as Democrats inquired several times about the impetus for the legislation.

Rep. John Ragan, the Republican sponsor from Oak Ridge near Knoxville, said divisive social concepts mirroring Marxist-style indoctrination were seeping into Tennessee classrooms. He cited statistics about lagging literacy rates and graduates who need remedial coursework and said “far too much classroom time is devoted to things that do not adequately teach our students reading, math, science and other essential academic skills.”

During discussions in committee and on the floor of the House, Ragan also read parts of an email forwarded to him about the 7-year-old student in Franklin, an affluent town south of Nashville in Williamson County.

The story circulated extensively on social media after an April 21 education forum sponsored by the Republican Party’s local chapter and covered by the Tennessee Star, a conservative news outlet. According to The Star, a woman identifying herself as the parent of a student at Liberty Elementary School said her daughter came home from school one day and told her, “I’m ashamed that I’m white.”

Ragan told lawmakers: “The daughter then asked her mother, ‘Is there something wrong with me? Why am I hated so much?’”

“The 7-year-old is now in therapy,” Ragan said. “She is depressed. She doesn’t want to go to school. ... She is scared to death and has even had thoughts of killing herself.”

Bobbie Patray, the long-time president of the Tennessee Eagle Forum, which lobbies on family issues and opposes critical race theory, said the story mobilized people in Williamson County and across Tennessee to call for stricter guardrails on what teachers are teaching.

“It lit the match,” Patray reflected later in an interview with Chalkbeat. “It’s fine to think about what goes on in New York or California or somewhere out there, but this story about a 7-year-old girl brought it home to parents who said, ‘That could have been my baby!’”

“A 7-year-old girl ought to be playing with doll babies,” she added.

David Snowden, superintendent of the Franklin Special School District, said no parent has come forward to Liberty Elementary Principal Amy Patton, her teachers, or district officials with that complaint.

“I’m baffled,” Snowden told Chalkbeat a month after the report was published. “Most people with issues come to us for help in resolving them. But we have heard nothing directly from a parent.”

Snowden said administrators took the report seriously, speaking with teachers and reviewing class rosters to try to pinpoint any student who might be upset, as well as lessons that could have been upsetting.

“We didn’t uncover anything,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s not real. Maybe the parent will come forward to talk with us after the school year ends.”

Ragan told Chalkbeat that he didn’t talk with the family but spoke with an “original source” and stands by the story. “I have no reason to doubt it,” he said.

About half of the 3,600 students in the Franklin district are white, a fourth are Hispanic, and 14% are Black. In the much larger neighboring district of Williamson County Schools, 80% of students are white, 6% are Hispanic, and 5% are Black.

Williamson County has been a hotbed of discussion about diversity training for teachers and learning materials that some parents have found inappropriate or offensive.

Nationally recognized curriculum called Wit & Wisdom, approved by both the state and the county district and introduced last fall, includes second-grade reading materials about civil rights champions like Martin Luther King Jr. and Ruby Bridges, the 6-year-old who became the first Black child to integrate an elementary school in the South.

“Ruby Bridges Goes to School,” a Scholastic Inc. book written by Ruby Bridges about her experience of integrating a white school at age 6, is among reading materials for second graders that some Williamson County parents found objectionable.

Some Williamson County parents said the images in the Scholastic Inc. autobiography “Ruby Bridges Goes to School” are one-sided and portray all white people as bigots who support segregation. The book is for young readers.

Many parents viewed those as important stories but worried they were being presented in a way that was too graphic and deep for their children in early grades. Some believe the curriculum is part of a wider conspiracy to indoctrinate their children in socialist principles. The mistrust has mobilized groups like Moms for Liberty, which recently hosted a nearly three-hour presentation on critical race theory attended by 300-plus people in Franklin.

“The amount that we don’t know about our teachers who teach our children should scare us, with the amount of time and influence they have on our children,” Robby Starbuck, a Nashville-area father and filmmaker, told the crowd.

A crowd of Williamson Countians listen to speakers at a presentation about critical race theory hosted in Franklin by the Moms for Liberty advocacy group on May 19, 2021.

Sekou Franklin, an associate professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University, said there’s a broader dynamic at play beyond curriculum concerns. The goal of Tennessee’s critical race theory bill, he said, was both to rally the Republican base for upcoming elections and anchor public education in a “white-washed” presentation of history and current events.

“This is really about white kids and what they’re learning in our K-12 schools,” Franklin said. “They’re seeking to insulate white kids from a narrative that could threaten the political and economic power of whites at a time when you have a growing non-white population.”

Biden civic grants ‘trigger’ GOP response

The new Tennessee law outlines 14 tenets that teachers cannot present or promote. The ideas generally mirror language in bills filed in recent months in Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and West Virginia.

Among the forbidden concepts: that the United States is “fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist;” that an individual, by virtual of their race or sex, “bears responsibility” for past actions committed by other members of the same race or sex; and that a “meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist.”

“Our bill never mentions the words critical race theory,” said Rep. Scott Cepicky, a Republican from Maury County, also south of Nashville. “We focused on 14 tenets that are divisive in nature, pit one race or sex against another, and produce blame. That’s not what our country is about.”

In the week after the federal civics grant announcement, Cepicky and White met twice with other leaders of the House’s five education panels to discuss a potential legislative response to critical race theory, the academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism.

“Everybody knew what we were talking about because we had been following this issue. It was just like, ‘I think it’s time. What do y’all think?’ We all agreed it was time,” said Cepicky, calling the Biden grants “the trigger.”

Screen snapshot of Rep. Scott Cepicky speaking during a House education committee meeting on May 28, 2020

On April 27, with just over a week before adjournment, White, Cepicky, and Ragan met with House Speaker Cameron Sexton in his office to ask for his support. Sexton conferred with Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, the speaker of the Senate, and they agreed to back a new proposal banning any teaching that injects race and sex when discussing legal, economic, educational, and other systems that GOP leaders believe are merit-based and colorblind.

But there were logistical challenges, since new bills couldn’t be introduced at that point in the session and education committees for both chambers had completed their business and closed for the year.

An existing bill by Ragan and Sen. Mike Bell, a Republican from Riceville, was chosen as the vehicle. Because it was a “clean-up” proposal to delete outdated language in state code, its general description was broad enough to add an amendment prohibiting the concepts that the GOP found worrisome. The bill had already passed in the Senate and was awaiting a vote on the House floor.

On the Friday afternoon of April 30 — three days before the body would adjourn — Ragan filed his amendment after White announced he would reopen his committee briefly to consider new business. But a hiccup emerged the following Monday morning when, an hour before the meeting, a staff member for Senate Education Committee Chairman Brian Kelsey asked to add three more tenets to the 11 already in the amendment.

White said no to more last-minute language, noting that the Senate eventually would get to vote on any amended bill.

Within 30 minutes and over the objections of the committee’s three Black Democratic members, the revised bill easily cleared the committee, while more than 60 Republican representatives signed on as co-sponsors.

The next day, after an hour of emotional debate, the House passed the measure too.

Later, Democrats thought they had dodged a bullet when the Senate quietly rejected the measure. But Kelsey, a lawyer from Germantown near Memphis, simply wanted it sent to a conference committee so he could add his three new tenets.

“There was no question we were going to pass the bill,” said Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson of Franklin, about his chamber’s voice vote. “It was a procedural motion. We wanted to add provisions to make the bill a little clearer, a little more thorough.”

Two Democrats who serve on the education committee had a different perspective.

Rep. Antonio Parkinson, a Democrat from Memphis, speaks at a 2020 news conference.

“This whole thing was orchestrated,” Rep. Antonio Parkinson, from Memphis, told Chalkbeat later. “The way it was done completely limited debate and the chance for citizens to offer their views. It was intentional.”

Rep. Vincent Dixie, from Nashville, called the rush to passage disheartening.

“If you are a person of color and you live in Tennessee,” he said, “you feel very diminished right now, that you don’t feel like you’re part of the conversation.”

After George Floyd’s murder, my students wrote protest poetry

2021-05-25T23:17:46+00:00

On June 1 of last year, a student sent me a poem.

This wasn’t particularly unusual. I teach creative writing, and we’d spent the year creating poems, short stories, and various art projects. I work with ninth graders in New York City who identify as female or gender-nonconforming/non-binary. We spend a lot of our time on journaling and personal reflection in order to feel comfortable enough to make art.

M.K. Rainey

But this poem was something special. It was a response to the murder of George Floyd and the protests it sparked around the world, and it floored me. Its author, Justein, gave me permission to share it:

“It ends with us”

I’m not saying all lives don’t matter
I’m just saying my life matters
they don’t see danger when they see you
they do when they look at my brother
It never ended with my ancestors
but it will end with us
It never stopped with Rosa on the bus
but it will with us
An innocent man shot down,
yet you expect us to smile and be happy like clowns
How many more tears should we shed
when another black man is shot dead
How many mothers will cry
cause her son had to die?
Your son died, but why?
Is it because his nose isn’t straight
or the thick curls in his hair?
Is it the color of his skin
or that his lips aren’t that thin?
Do we only have to look like you
to actually fit in?
Do I have to look like you so I can live?
Why do you kill us for being bold and loving
the way we were built?
I’m not saying All Lives Don’t Matter, I’m just saying
Black People Are Killed!
Killed because of the way we were built
Trayvon, Philandro, Michael, Eric, and now George
How many more hashtags do you need
to feel our pain?
We cry today, then you spew hate like rain
No peace, no justice until you stop this
Stop killing us because you wish we didn’t exist
It didn’t end at Selma, but it will with us!

I emailed her back right away and asked if she would share the poem in class that week and whether she would mind if I crafted a lesson around it. She was happy to share; she wanted it to be heard.

In class that week, after we did our opening journal entry and after Justein shared her poem, I gave my class a choice: We could eschew any lesson for that day and spend the time reflecting on what was happening in the world, or we could make art in response to it. More specifically, we could make protest poetry. Overwhelmingly, they chose the latter.

What followed made me think more deeply about how educators can engage with activism to offer avenues for students’ critical thinking and creative expression.

I started with a body awareness activity in order to pinpoint anxiety, sadness, or other emotions my students needed to work through and had them answer questions about what was happening in the world from that body part’s perspective. This time, as always, I didn’t tell them what to write about. We took those notes into various “writing stations” I made up and created different kinds of poetry together.

When they were through, I gathered that work into an anthology.

Over the past year, I’ve repeated this lesson and added to it. In January, my students and I met just as supporters of the then-President were storming the Capitol. My students needed no encouragement and jumped into writing collaborative, community poems about what was happening.

Here’s an excerpt from “We the People,” written jointly by students Ashlyn, Makula, Mim, Kimora, and Brianna:

“We the people”, have we forgotten that phrase?
The words passed down from our founding fathers on those holy days.
We give power to the eagles above
But the ones below are not mice, their voices shall not be silenced or shunned
America is a melting pot filled with cultures and flavors from all across the lands
But once you add a pinch of lies along with a dash of salt, you turn something savory into sand.

And from “Society” by Evangeline, Fahamida, Michelle, Sarah, and Alyssa:
Society: Upset/Shocked
The events that unfolded
led the nation to have unloaded
The emotion of shock.
Surprised that people who “love”
This nation, unlocked
The unimaginable, killing off the dove.
Leaving those who fought
For the freedom of others
Upset, by the treatment they received.
A “Dark Day”, They say
The same words that reflect the takeaway.
Society marked this day
as an unforgettable grey.
Society.

I’ve come to learn that the word “activism” is a hot-button topic for a lot of educators. Recently, I received an email from someone who heard me use the phrase “art as activism.” “I find this very concerning-the idea of turning children into activists,” they wrote. “They should be given a platform where they can express what they feel no matter what that is — thru dance/music or painting — I don’t think they need to be oriented toward activism.”

The note only increased my resolve to facilitate activism in this way. Not once along the way did I ever tell my students what to write about or whom to support. What I did was offer avenues for critical thinking and creative expression. My students can look at the world and analyze whether or not what they are seeing aligns with their values as humans. And if they don’t? Then I’ve created outlets for them to express that and feel heard. Telling students they can express themselves but not call for change robs them of power.

In my mind, art has always been activism’s first cousin. Why wouldn’t I bring activism into the classroom?

Now, I am focused on building curriculums that center around art as activism in the classroom. In fact, my colleague and I ended up collaborating on a Protest Poetry workshop for teachers, which you can view here.

Justein’s poem made concrete what I’d always felt was my job as a teacher: to facilitate ways to empower students to say what they feel and then find ways for them to be heard.

The class anthology can be viewed below:

M.K. (Katie) Rainey, a native of Little Rock, Arkansas, teaches creative writing at the Young Women’s Leadership School of Jamaica, Queens. She’s also an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, The Collagist, 3AM Magazine, and more. She is the editor-in-chief of Animal Riot Press, a literary press she co-founded, and co-hosts the Animal Riot Reading Series and the feminist podcast Rosé All Day Anyways.

I am a veteran history teacher. Let me teach history.

2021-05-25T19:29:20+00:00

A couple of years ago, as I listened to a radio report about how North Carolina’s strict voter ID law “targets African Americans with almost surgical precision,” my eyes welled with tears. I wondered: Why do they hate us so much? Now the headlines in North Carolina, the state where I live and teach U.S. history, civics, and economics, read: “North Carolina House approves bill to limit teaching of race.” My reaction this time is different: This cannot and will not continue.

And it’s not just North Carolina. Lawmakers in states around the country are attempting to block the teaching of critical race theory, which looks at how racism continues to affect individuals and society. (One such bill was signed into law in Tennessee this week.)

Valencia Ann Abbott

I am a Black woman, and teaching my history — telling the truth about it — should not be controversial. Teaching historical facts in context should not merit a parent email that turns into a parent conference with the administration. An award-winning, vetted book should not be why calls are made to the district central office. Teachers are professionals, and while every lesson is not perfect, each teaching moment has the potential to challenge students, help them grow, and inspire their love of learning.

As a history teacher, a professional educator with years of experience in the classroom, my main job is to teach historical truths. Each year I attend so many professional development sessions that I sometimes don’t even turn in all of my continuing education credit certificates because I have surpassed the requirements for teacher recertification. In addition, I regularly connect with colleagues and organizations on social media to bring my students the most comprehensive and contemporary understanding of my content area. Finally, I often spend weekends at historical sites or walking trails while listening to the latest book talk on relevant topics. I do this so that I can be better, stronger, and know more for my students — and also because I have a passion for the study of history.

I come to my classroom prepared to teach, with hours of planning and research under my belt. Yet, after several recent incidents, I have left the classroom deflated, accused, and filled with anxiety. For example, one of my recent lessons about how the First Amendment protects the right to protest included an article about the Black Lives Matter movement that was met with criticism from a parent.

“They don’t do that in our home,” the parent told me.

Do what, I wondered. Learn about a current event that is gripping the country? Understand that that history is steeped in protest and civil rights are hard-won? See value in the lives of people of African descent? What do they think the American Revolution was, if not a big, old protest?

During the 2008 presidential election, I was teaching in Virginia. Soon after the media called the state of Virginia for Barack Obama, my youngest daughter sent me a text thanking me for living in the state that would give the country its first Black president. To me, that is my most precious memory of this historical moment.

During the 2020 election, I was teaching through a computer screen. I could see my students’ names, but that’s about it; their cameras were often off and their mics muted. To state the obvious, it wasn’t the ideal space to have organic political conversations with teenagers. But watching parades of trucks waving gigantic Confederate and Trump flags and seeing heinous postings on our social media platforms, I understood the polarization that continues to grip us and is making its way into my virtual and physical classroom.

This is not to say all of my efforts to teach “controversial” topics have been met with hostility. I had a 10th grade student tell me he was glad that I came to teach at her school because she had not learned about Black history until I got there. This student had spent over a decade in the public school system — and just now was having her first lessons that centered Black people. Not that it matters, but that student is white.

Another student sent me an email full of emotion after reading the book “Enrique’s Journey,” a true story about an undocumented immigrant family. It was the first time she had her culture reflected back to her in an educational setting, she wrote.

I hung a poster on the classroom wall of Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected official, on the classroom wall, alongside images of Thomas Jefferson and the Constitution that I got from James Madison’s Montpelier. I did this because intentionally choosing to incorporate those underrepresented voices in the teaching of the curriculum is what an effective teacher does. Knowing that these voices matter to all students is what a caring teacher does.

The point is that none of this should be “controversial” to teach. My job is to teach historical truths, to help my students become critical readers and thinkers and skillful and persuasive writers. Revealing long-ignored history gives students a more comprehensive understanding of the past, which in turn gives us a deeper understanding of ourselves.

I make sure that my students’ identities are reflected in the lessons as I teach in civics and economics and American History I and II (which should be titled United States History I and II) so that my students understand the power that they hold in the world.

But the classroom has become a minefield of political dos and don’ts. Some educators have told me that there are now certain topics (truths!) that they will not touch or teach out of fear that it will put their jobs in jeopardy. Legislative attempts to block the teaching of critical race theory and The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project only raise the temperature. I am tired and mad that in the 21st century, I’m still fighting for people to see humanity in our Blackness, still forced to convince people in power that our stories are worthy of being taught.

Valencia Ann Abbott is the social studies department chair and a history teacher at Rockingham Early College High School in Wentworth, North Carolina. Abbott spearheads “The Civil Rights Movement Beyond 1968: Griggs vs. Duke Power Company” project, marking the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in a landmark employment discrimination case.